Naruto: Ryukatsu's Ambition
by JasonEpsilon725
Summary: In a world where most Ninja have incredible abilities, powerful Kekkei Genkai, their own Tailed Beast or inhuman levels of skill and power, one young Genin has only his mind. Ryukatsu Yamakuri of Team Thirteen has a dream, a dream of making a new world, a better world... And nothing shall stand in the way of his ambition. Smart!OC, NaruHina in later chapters.
1. The Day a New King Was Born

There was no time to think. No time to calculate, play the odds, change the rules, visualise possible outcomes, or even weigh the inherent costs and benefits of every possible action. The gates loomed in front of him like a colossal visualisation of the metaphorical crossroads of fate, taunting him, demanding he make one final choice.

Did he really have to join The Shinobi Academy of Konoha?

A short twelve-year old Ryukatsu Shogun looked up at those gates, his straight strands of rosewood hair falling back over his emerald-eyed face. He wore a dark-green shirt, loose black tracksuit pants held up by a belt with two pouches of training ninja tools attached to each hip, and black rubber boots.

It was time to make a decision. Ryukatsu Shogun had no Kekkei Genkai, no spectacular world-famous ninja parents(Both were retired, average, and only Chunin-level), and he only had a minor proficiency in Genjutsu, along with the precise chakra control necessary for that and possibly Medical Jutsu. He wasn't that good at physical stuff, like combat. Ok, fine, he sucked at physical combat. He could throw some decent punches and kicks, but practice spars with the boys in his neighbourhood proved a prolonged physical fight would end with him on the ground, getting beaten down until he surrendered or went past the limits of friendly sparring. In any case, he he was smart, and he knew it. Still, he appeared to be a support-type Ninja, if ever there was one. Would that be enough to make him a great ninja? Could he fulfill his ambition, to make a world worth protecting in his eyes, or would he die on some mission, another insignificant and ultimately forgotten name on some big rock that most people didn't even know the importance of, tucked away in one of the training areas few Ninja and even fewer Civilians visited? What, did they not like advertising the fact that Shinobi were not gods, and when even the strongest Ninja ran out of chakra, he was as vulnerable and mortal as a common farmer? Perhaps it would be better to give up now, and try another way. Maybe he could become a politician, or a diplomat. Then again, ninja skills would be useful for both of those paths, and some random kid from Konoha didn't really become either of those.

In Konoha, if you weren't a Ninja, you ran a business that supported Ninja. If you couldn't do that, you'd either run a business entirely inside the walls, or you'd shell out for exterior trade routes, knowing that at any moment, a shipment could be destroyed by bandits, your month's profits going with it. And if you couldn't do any of that, you sucked, and you'd better get used to whatever job you could get to pay the high rent of this Hidden Village's buildings. As for politics... Could he handle having to kiss rear ends and letting his owners think for him until he gained enough power to do something with a station that was meaningless if you couldn't use the power however you wanted? Would that even work, considering how unlikely the fat little pigs that ran most business empires and occupied high-ranking political stations were likely to allow some former Ninja any rank higher than he "Deserved"? Given the choice between that fatfest and an exciting career path where your abilities would actually matter... Becoming a Ninja was really looking like the best option here.

Then again... He'd heard what his father had to say about this place, and what that man's ANBU drinking buddies/sparring partners had to say about it. How most ANBU had to unlearn most of what they were taught at the Academy, particularly the taijutsu styles, and how it was designed to only teach the absolute basics... partly so that a Genin's Sensei could set their own training programs and tailor their real teaching to suit the individual and make each of their Ninja the best they could be, but mostly so that those who failed the Genin Exam and became ordinary Civilians wouldn't end up knowing dangerous Ninja techniques, only the absolute basics every Ninja knew... and even then, they'd rarely have much reason to use or remember them. And a great deal of it was also wasted on Ninja history, mainly focusing on war. And he'd also heard what those ANBU Ninja had to say about the Jonin(And even worse, the Special Jonin) that were stuck teaching.

So... Fight and die for his home and a shot at his dream, or waste away on lesser paths he wasn't meant to tread.

He made his decision. A young Ryukatsu Shogun walked through the imposing gates of the Leaf Village Ninja Academy, alone.

His first day at the Academy was mediocre, and a real letdown, though he wasn't sure why he was hoping something better than he expected would happen. They talked about what it meant to be a ninja, did a few physical exercises, threw some wooden kunai at targets, and began teaching the absolute basics of Chakra: How it works, how it's all around us, and so on... rather than anything useful and cool like Ninjutsu or Genjutsu. Out of fifty-two students in the footrace during gym class, he came sixth, he wasn't asked any questions during the lessons, and he only put his hand up for the questions he definitely knew the answer to, he spent his break times on meditation and beginner chakra exercises, and he didn't talk to anyone. He found his classes boring. Those classes were only for Academy Students. It wasn't enough for him.

Instead of going straight home, Ryukatsu Shogun spent the rest of his day in the Konoha Library, intending to get a head start on his peers. He ran all the way there, and began reading. He went home at 9PM, when the kindly old lady who owned the place got his attention and reminded him that he had a home to return to. He hoped she was just trying to be polite about asking him to leave, though there was probably some uber-sad reason for that instead, so he cheerfully sprinted home. The library stayed open all night every day, but she still wanted him to go home. He was still just a kid. When he got home, he told his parents he was studying at the library and he had to do it to become a great Shinobi, and they understood. After all, what kind of parent objected to their child learning?

Within his first week as an official Ninja, he had taught himself most of the basics of Ninjutsu and Genjutsu theory, knowing his class would eventually cover those topics and the less important parts he skipped over, he learned some good physical, mental and chakra exercises for beginners and began doing them whenever he had spare time, he began to focus on enhancing and training his ability to subconsciously use chakra to strengthen and reinforce his body, and he could soon outrun most of the ninja in his class. He could soon outrun pretty much anyone there, except that idiot Kiba Inuzuka, that double-idiot Naruto Uzumaki, or the surprisingly-skilled Sasuke Uchiha. Annoyingly, they were a little faster than him even with his enhancements, and much faster than the others in the class). Still, this did not convince him to stop training his speed, for to him, speed was the most important physical attribute he could develop. Strength might sound impressive, but speed allowed you to throw kunai into enemies while dodging attacks that would kill you no matter how strong or tough you were. He was still alone, but he didn't care much about that.

Within a month, he was learning D-Rank Ninjutsu and C-Rank Genjutsu, and he'd test them out on anyone willing to spar with him or get into a fight with him. Still, out of a desire to avoid tipping his hand or getting in trouble for hurting anyone too badly, he tried to keep things on the safe side, and just as a rather unusual book on T+I techniques once told him, he always prepared a 'safeword' before sparring matches began. Still, few people wanted to spar with him more than once, unless he promised not to use Genjutsu during the fight. He'd memorised the location of every bone in the human body, and their names, learned the major weak points of the human body, learned all he could from every book on First Aid, stealth, or battle tactics he could find, and he began reading about poisons. His body was soon in a fairly fit condition, fit enough to run a few laps of the Academy's playground and complete a few sets of ten sit-ups, and using chakra to dull the sensation of physical exhaustion helped a great deal when working out, but when it came to actual fights, his specialisation was still firmly in the chakra-related arts. And he was still alone.

He visited the Konoha hospital one Saturday morning, and with a great deal of adorable childlike enthusiasm, he told them that he wanted to become the best doctor ever and save everyone, and then asked for a tour and some free supplies. They refused, which he had partly expected. So, when nobody was looking, he decided to put what he'd learned to use. After all, he had given them a chance.

Konoha Hospital's had two storerooms, each only locked by a single padlocked metal door and a civilian janitor who Ryukatsu assumed was a disguised Ninja or former Ninja on patrol, but was actually just a civilian janitor mopping the floors. Ryukatsu assumed there was a hidden blade in the mop, but it was actually just a mop. Even if he was only an Academy Student right now, Ryukatsu was a Ninja, it wasn't too hard to get a rock from outside and toss it, to get the janitor to look in the opposite direction and search the other side of the room while he silently slipped past. Ryukatsu had also read several books on lockpicking and locksmithing, so a cheap padlock like this held no challenge for him when he was armed with a hairpin he'd taken from one of Sasuke's fangirls while she was gazing longingly at Sasuke, oblivious to the rest of the world. Precisely why did that girl feel the need to carry so many different hairpins around at once? ...Irrelevant, he had a job to do. He did that job, and ended up casually sprinting home as usual with two small boxes of twenty scalpels each, along with two bottles each of assorted antivenoms and antitoxins, several boxes of 200 pairs of plastic gloves, a small microscope, a larger and more powerful microscope that became even more powerful when chakra was focused into it, and fifteen plastic face-masks all stuffed into the many sealing scrolls inside sealing scrolls he carried with him. Everything else was left the way he'd found it. When the civilian Janitor saw the open door, he shrugged and assumed that some overworked doctor forgot to close the door. He closed it for that imaginary overworked doctor, and nobody ever suspected a thing.

Ryukatsu was tempted to hide the stolen goods somewhere in his room, then he decided they'd probably be safer hidden in his weapons-sealing scrolls. Nobody ever looked inside those, and legally speaking, nobody was allowed to look in them. He sometimes wondered if any other students took advantage of this, or if any non-ninja used these scrolls to hide contraband, alcohol, or adult magazines, but then he remembered something important: It didn't particularly matter, and he didn't really care.

Annoyingly, the Academy's curriculum barely touched Genjutsu. Ryukatsu had to research that on his own, and most books in the Konoha library spent their time and page-space warning about the dangers of Genjutsu, rather than offering up new and exciting Genjutsu ideas. It would seem he would have to come up with his own ideas... which he could do. After all, the books did say Genjutsu required intelligence, imagination and a strong mind. He was pretty sure he had all of those things.

After two months, he'd improved quite a bit. He was no god, and he'd probably never be one, but he deemed his current level adequate... for now. He gained a reputation, and was seen as the usual creepy know-it-all. He had yet to decide upon some variety of awesome nickname, epithet or moniker, but he had a few strong possibilities. He could use the Chakra exercises for water-walking and walking up trees, and began to develop a taste for reading books and talking to people while upside-down, standing on ceilings or on walls with his legs bent, his body performing stretches. He figured out a jutsu to prevent the problem of blood rushing to his head when he did that for too long, purely out of necessity. He was smart, well-read, and he had yet to answer a single question incorrectly on any written exam or any question he was asked. He attempted to learn Barrier Jutsu, but found that he didn't have the raw chakra reserves to keep any kind of reflective barrier going for more than a half-second, or make any reflective barrier larger than three feet squared on the palm of his hand. His throwing skills were passable. He couldn't remove the wings of a fly without killing it, but from fifty feet, he could hit the bullseye with most of his thrown weapons, finding it easier to throw them while moving. He knew he had an Earth Affinity, because his father had Earth and Lightning(Specialising in Earth. Specifically, high-ranking wide-scale jutsu designed to precisely affect large quadrants of the battlefield. His father was a tactician and strategist with a perfect record of over 30 successfully-completed A-Rank missions, and a not-exactly-perfect record when it came to S-Rank missions. Ryukatsu wanted to beat that record) and his mother had Earth and Fire(And some basic medical jutsu, enough to heal an open wound or neutralize most poisons, but not enough to be classed as a 'Proper' 'Official' medic or doctor), so he began learning and mastering various Earth Jutsu, rapidly working his way up the list. To him, learning a Jutsu meant being able to use it, and mastering a Jutsu meant practising it at least ten times and getting good at using it, using his Chakra Control to reduce the Jutsu's total chakra cost by a percentage that grew with each performance. He'd mastered a C-Rank Genjutsu that made the user much harder to notice when not actively being searched for, and began practising an upgraded B-rank version for complete being-ignored invisibility that would apply to sounds made in a five-foot radius. He theorised that he could pour in even more chakra, increase the Jutsu's power, and create an A-Rank version that was so powerful, he could activate it, punch someone in the face, and the target would get up thinking they'd tripped or been knocked over by a sudden gust of wind. If they managed to put two and two together and decided there must be an invisible Ninja after them, they'd still be unable to see him for a few minutes, which was a lot more time than Ryukatsu needed to kill someone, when a stab to the neck or heart was something basic logic suggested. Best of all, due to the way these jutsu affected the caster and put him in a shaped shell of raw chakra rather than affecting the targets and their ability to notice or perceive people matching his description, a Genjutsu Kai performed by an intelligent foe would not be able to end the effects of the jutsu. Still, he'd rather use that jutsu as a backup-plan, one of the many aces he planned to amass. Most Ninja, typically Clan kids, tended to coast on one or two powerful Jutsu, never seeming to notice that they'd be completely scre- completely doomed if someone figured out how to negate their best Jutsu.

But he was still alone. He decided to change that.

Ryukatsu wasn't an idiot. He knew ninjas were always assigned to three-man Genin squads with a Jonin sensei, and he knew the rules wouldn't be changed for anyone, no matter how much he'd rather have a full-scale Army under his command. Or at least more than two Ninja, and a Jonin that'd likely pull rank and ignore his strategies.

He knew what methods the Academy used to form teams, once he'd read about them in the library. First, they'd pair up ninjas with complimentary abilities(A slow but powerful guy with a fast guy, or one with grabbing/rooting abilities with someone with slow but powerful attacks, or a long-range specialist with a mid-range or close-range specialist), then they'd pair the worst Academy Student(Definitely Naruto... but then again... Most of Sasuke's fangirls were pretty terrible) with the best Academy Student(Probably Sasuke Uchiha. Shino Aburame and possibly Shikamaru Nara seemed like they'd make pretty good Ninja, if Shikamaru could actually get over himself, but the teachers here had so much Uchiha favouritism... Not enough to make things ridiculously clear, but they'd class his grades as 100% perfect in a subject if he was only 80 or 90% correct, and only ask him questions if the staff knew he'd know the answers. And to his credit, Sasuke wasn't an incompetent little turd, and he never asked for this treatment... in fact, he seemed to find it irritating. The guy wanted to improve and avenge his family, not feel good about himself or bask in the adoration of stupid kids. If he was an incompetent turd, Ryukatsu would find the favouritism far more annoying) to balance them out, then they'd pair the friends, then the rivals, then they'd pair up whoever was left. Anyone on the Civilian Council could request certain ninja be placed together, but they usually squabbled over getting their kids paired up with the best young ninjas to pick up their slack, instead of rationally choosing and requesting the Shinobi whose personalities and abilities complimented their own, and it was rare for their petty squabbling to actually be taken into consideration when forming Ninja teams.

Ryukatsu didn't trust anyone's judgement but his own. After all, they were not as smart as him. Well... the current Hokage's intellect might come close... and Shikamaru was able to beat him at Shogi and Go(But not in debates, or anything physical, or anything chakra-related. Then again, Shikamaru didn't really get into contests like that often)... but that was it. As far as he was concerned, those were his only equals. Still, he doubted either of them could help him with this.

Ryukatsu would have to do something the young bookworm had never done before. He would have to make some friends.

He shivered just thinking about it. Still, he'd read a few books on people, how they worked, how they thought, how to control and manipulate them, how to throw parties and how to be a good leader. And then he'd read a few more books on how to act in public, how to be polite, how to be seen as a good person, and how to make people like you. He remembered his favourite character from a manga he'd just started reading, who never had any friends before the series began, and yet things turned out brilliantly for her. He could do this.

He saw Naruto Uzumaki, who his parents had told him to avoid. Ryukatsu had observed him like a true scientist and watched the dumb blonde fail every task he was given and incorrectly answer every question he was asked. He then quickly decided to stop observing Naruto before he lost his voice from laughing too hard, or lost any brain cells from standing too close. He turned and took a few steps away, just to be safe.

In the middle of the schoolyard, he thought for a moment, mentally bringing up the physical and psychological profiles of every classmate he'd observed and cross-referencing them with the traits and qualities he believed a Ninja on his team should have. When he'd decided on the few best choices, he approached his first viable target: a young, bored and lost-looking Genin with navy-blue hair in a slightly-curly center parting and sad hazel eyes, wearing a tight navy-blue shirt that matched his hair, dark black trousers with deep pockets, both literally and metaphorically, and blue sandals. Hamada Suguira.

Ryukatsu stared at Hamada with a large smile on his face for a few moments before speaking. "Hey." Ryukatsu greeted casually.

"Hey." Hamada responded sadly.

Ryukatsu tensed up suddenly, realising he completely forgot to plan out the entire conversation ahead of time. Improvisation was not his strong suit. "MY NAME IS RYUKATSU AND I LIKE BOOKS." He declared stiffly.

"...Are you okay?" Hamada asked, tilting his head to the right.

"I'm fine." Ryukatsu said with a practised smile, putting on a slightly lower and smoother-sounding voice to try and sound more confident and awesome. Hamada's hesitation before asking if he was okay gave him all the time he needed to think up a few possible angles to work with. "How are things?"

"Uh... Good, I guess." He shrugged, deciding to completely forget about Ryukatsu's strange outburst. It was probably the stress. Ninja training was hard.

"You're Hamada Sugiura, right?" Ryukatsu asked conversationally, though with a glimmer of eagerness a well-trained Ninja could have noticed. "Your dad's on the Civilian Council, you're afraid of spiders, and you doubt you'll ever even graduate from the Academy... Which is exactly what you want, right?"

"What makes you so sure of that?" Hamada asked, getting into a boxing stance.

"I know stuff." Ryukatsu said with a creepy smile that suggested he knew a lot more. It didn't do anything to Hamada. Internally, Ryukatsu screamed in rage. He began to notice that the idiot's stance wasn't an official Ninja stance, and more importantly, it sucked. It left the lower body unguarded, the center of gravity was pretty high, and while you might have some good agility in that stance, a decent kunai stab from him could empty the- Ryukatsu realized he was getting distracted, and fixed that issue. He spoke, and as he said what seemed right, Hamada relaxed. "Anyway, you don't want to be their toy. You want to fail, get kicked out of the Academy, and become a lame, lazy noble just like your old man. You were probably only made a Ninja so you could be one of their political tools, something to give their words more weight in the Civilian Council. 'My son's a Ninja, so therefore I know what I'm talking about, so listen to me and only me!'. Sad part is, those stupid emotion-based fallacy-filled arguments usually work on dumb Civilians. However... What if I told you there was a better way? Rather than relying on your parents, you join my team, become a great Shinobi, do a bunch of assassination missions, get bounties, leave your family behind and get even more money than them?"

"And then what happens? Do I get magical eyes, too?" Hamada asked sarcastically.

"You know what? If we ever kill a Missing-Nin with those things, when I'm done analysing them, you can have them." Ryukatsu decided.

"I was being sarcastic. Why do you want me on your team, anyway?" Hamada asked bitterly, thinking of all the girls he'd tried to talk to, only for them to want Sasuke instead. The Uchiha's inheritance and clan coffers vastly outweighed his own. The Uchiha's strength and speed vastly outclassed his own. And that air of effortless coolness around him, the way he seemed to not even care how many girls loved him... even he was impressed. "Why not Sasuke-Kuuuuun?"

"Do you honestly see that guy following my orders any time soon?" Ryukatsu asked with a chuckle. "I respect his skill and all, but I don't want a loose cannon who thinks he knows better than me, and won't respect the value of teamwork. Besides, he'll be stuck with that idiot Naruto thanks to the 'Pair the best with the worst' rule I bet a civilian thought up, and one of his lame Fangirls to lower the average skill of the unit even more. Do not want. On the other hand, a team with me as the head, you as the muscle and someone else as the support might actually do pretty well."

Hamada straightened up a little. "Maybe, but... I doubt the price of a few cutpurse's lives will even approach the riches my parents have."

"Most A-Rank and S-Rank Missing-Nin have bounties exceeding 100,000 Ryo. If we got them all... Imagine how rich we'd be!" Ryukatsu said excitedly. "Imagine how rich you'd be! Why pretend to be their perfect son and deny who you are, when you can become a great man and get more money than they ever will!"

"I don't know..." Hamada said uncertainly.

"Imagine the girls! The ladies!" Ryukatsu said desperately.

"Girls?" Hamada asked, suddenly interested.

Ryukatsu grew more confident as he saw an opening. He settled into his rhythm, attacking that point as vigorously as he could. The books he'd read told him what to do here: Present yourself as a knowledgeable person that knows something average folk don't, mock some belief they doubt or reveal some kind of 'Truth' about the world they've suspected, and gradually saying what they want to hear until they want to hear more. The emo-tastic whinefest speeches of assorted fictional cynics provided the basis of most of the speech he formulated loosely in his head, intending on changing details and directions depending on which sentences elicited the correct subtle responses. "Let me guess, you've been lied to your whole life, and told the girls will love you if you're nice to them and you treat them like regular people?" 'Not quite' _,_ "Or that all lower-class girls are evil lying money-sucking barnacles, while only your fellow upper-class people are people good enough to marry?" He continued seamlessly. _Yeah, now we're getting somewhere._ "Both of those statements are total bull. For starters, how do you intentionally treat a person like a regular person? The whole sentence is stupid, it implies that those who tried too hard to get girls and did what they thought they were supposed to and failed anyway only failed because they didn't 'treat them right', even though no woman can decide how woman should be treated. Or that the unlucky guys are just naturally terrible people that don't deserve love, when the truth is they were just brought up on stupid fantasy stories about how ideal women think and feel, a fantasy that serves as a terrible training guide for reality. They were probably fed this lie by dumb women that didn't want to admit dumb or bad women exist, because if they do, it means there's evidence that their entire gender isn't automatically and magically pure at all, and they don't want to admit that their one and only positive quality - being born as a pretty and magical and special female human, rather than a boring and common and violent male human - might not count at all. Come on, Hamada, you're smarter than that." 'Oh, he liked hearing that'. Ryukatsu detected. "You're smarter than those idiotic hen-pecked civilian men, their hopes and dreams utterly dead, their lives already wasted when they're only thirty or twenty, slaving away at crappy jobs and eating cup ramen every night so they can afford to live with crippling debt, yet still buy overpriced jewelry to temporarily slake the ever-growing appetites of the fat middle-aged pet sows they're saddled with for life, the ones that seemed like The One back on their honeymoon, but are now so fat, they're practically The Three. You're smarter than the stupid husbands that'll blow their current savings on a shiny rock to placate the mercurial tempers of their shallow, sociopathic, emotionally-underdeveloped womanchild brides that learned as children that if they cried like enough of a brat, their parents would give them nice things, and if they acted the same way to their husbands, he'd give them nice things. You're smarter than those young Ninja boys dating older civilian girls whose only skill is looking pretty, and secretly hope their lover will die on a mission and leave them with a nice 'Sorry your loved one died' package, even though they only give those out for Jonin. Not that he'll tell her, because deep down, he knows that's the only reason why she's interested in a guy like him. Willing to accept an unequal relationship just because it's better than nothing, and you don't realize equal pairings, or better, pairings slanted in your favour, can exist... What kind of loser suckles at a pig's teat? Girls don't want kind, honest, mature, nice men willing to treat them as equals. And they don't want kind but spineless beta-male idiots willing to wait on them hand and foot, either. They see those people as the easy option, the safe option, the one they'll stick with after trying all the exciting, spicy alpha meals on the menu they know will probably burn them, but that's just part of the fun. Their old, burned-out bodies can be looked after by the boring options when they're done with having fun in life. You don't want to get stuck with an old hag's burned-out body, do you? All the girly romance novels written by women, for women, star average girls who rich guys suddenly fall in love with for no reason. Or vice versa. It's a fantasy, a fantasy where an awesome and rich guy will take interest in an ordinary normie girl like her, without her having to do anything to earn said love. You have to be pretty freaking awesome if you manage to make a woman think she needs to earn anything from you, but if you do, you can do ANYTHING to her, because she has no yardstick for this sort of thing. And if you get bored and dump her and move on to the next cute girl, she'll just go and cry into her pillow, also known as her pet beta. You have the money, sure, but you lack the confidence and power needed to play the role of alpha. But when you get it, _you can have whoever you want in this town, or any town in the Land of Fire, and you can have as many of them as you want, because you'll be that alpha._ "

It was official, Hamada was hooked. This guy would probably take a mortal blow meant for him at this rate. Well... Probably not, that was pretty extreme for someone you only recently met. "Any of them?" He asked, surprised. His mind filled with visions of himself with a massive harem of beautiful women, his father watching and crying while his much smaller harem tried in vain to cheer the old man up.

"Any of them. Except Tenten, from a year up. You know, with the ninja tools and hair-balls? I love her with all my heart." Ryukatsu stated with the vaguely-emotional certainty one would have when saying something like 'Swords are objectively superior', but not the far more emotional tone one would have when confessing their love. Still, Ryukatsu was sure he loved Tenten. Sure, he'd never actually talked to her, but she was really, really cute, she seemed awesome, she had a good head on her shoulders, she wasn't a Sasuke fangirl, she she looked really good when she had knives in her hands and spirals of deadly steel danced around her, sunlight glinting off the metal that could end a life as quickly as they'd save it... so far, everything looked good. He'd talk to her at a later date, when he was cooler and she'd be more likely to like him back. Also, was that seriously all it took to convince Hamada to join him? Great, now he'd just wasted a ton of energy on that emotacular speech. Then again, it wasn't really wasted, since it probably helped tip the scales in his favour.

"An older lady! Nice!" Hamada said in approval, punching his shoulder.

Ryukatsu forced a chuckle, not sure if the whole 'Older lady' thing counted when the 'lady' in question was barely a year older than you. Then again, they were Ninja. Old enough to kill, and all that. Age restrictions were for civilians. "Anyway, you'll be the frontline fighter, I'm a Chakra specialist-"

"You mean 'Ninjutsu Specialist?'" Hamada asked.

"Nope. I'm a Genjutsu Specialist, with good chakra control that'd probably be good for Medical Jutsu, and less-good-but-still-good reserves that'd be good for healing a lot of people or Ninjutsu. But, there's no reason I can't train my body and learn a bunch of Ninjutsu anyway. I'd rather dodge a fireball than waste chakra negating it." He smiled, closed his eyes, and shrugged. "Besides, Taijutsu is easy, you're just hitting and kicking something. Even that idiot Kiba can do it. I honestly can't understand why everyone isn't at least somewhat competent at it."

"Hey! Taijutsu is complicated!" Hamada insisted. He sometimes had trouble with the more complex Taijutsu forms the academy taught to familiarize opponents with the most common fighting styles, especially when they demanded your feet went into certain positions and your left foot had to be directly perpendicular yet rotating counterclockwise as you shifted the forefront of your vertical axis... or something, and then you had to shuffle your feet again into some other stance that just felt goofy to stay in, while the one his father had taught him felt natural and right.

"Yeah, sometimes you kick stuff... while spinning!" Ryukatsu gasped sarcastically. "And sometimes you punch something... then you punch it again with the other hand!" He chuckled, and then he asked, "Speaking of Jutsu, what can you do?"

"Not much. I'm slow, I don't like running, I have anger issues... honestly, I'm amazed I even got this far." He admitted sadly.

"You don't seem like someone with anger issues." Ryukatsu pointed out. "You just seem like someone who needs a good friend and an awesome weapon."

"I get frustrated sometimes. And what do you mean a weapon? I'm a ninja, not a Samurai." Hamada mumbled.

"Why not both?" Ryukatsu asked, smiling. "A Ninjai. Or a Samunja! Or a Ninjamurai! Or everything! You can buy a bunch of weapons, and swing them at your opponent until you win! And explosive tags! Who knows how many explosive tags you can buy? And use? Academy Students aren't allowed to buy Explosive Tags without an adult or Jonin Sensei present, but I can Henshin no Jutsu into anyone you want for that. In return, you'll buy my stuff, too. But think of the money we'll make! You can spend a little of your parents' money on gear, then make a lot more of your own money with it! And, you can be yourself. ...And you can get all the girls you want. Chicks dig power. And money."

"Yeah, that's great. Now listen, all Ninja teams have two guys and one girl or two girls and one guy, so we need a girl and we need one now." Hamada stated. "How about..." He thought for a moment, thinking of all the girls in his class. One with bright, eye-catching hair popped up in his mind, though he couldn't care enough to remember her name right now. "That pink-haired chick?"

"Sakura Haruno? Let me recommend a book titled Two-point-five Billion Shades of NO!" Ryukatsu laughed. Ha ha, that pun wasn't even funny. He was never saying it again, ever. "She's lame, violent, and I can smell the crazy on her from a mile away. Have you seen the way she'll switch psyches between 'Sweet and sappy Sasuke-wanting Sakura' to 'Naruto-punching Angry Mob Member' as soon as she gets angry and the people around her change?"

"Uh... No." He admitted.

"Well, I have, and the whole 'Inner Self/Outer Self' thing she's got going on is pretty unhealthy. It makes one wonder how much of herself she's repressed in order to become what Sasuke-Kuuuun would see as attractive, if the repressed parts of her psyche have actually manifested as a second personality. I wonder if it talks to her, or if it just makes comments while she lives her life. I wonder if she talks back to it. I wonder if it could be used to defend herself from Genjutsu or a mind-based attack from a Yamanaka. I wonder if she has recurring nightmares where it beats her to a near-death state, representing her self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy, and then Sasuke comes and saves her by kicking its butt, the panicked thoughts of a mind that desperately needs her Sasuke-Kun. I wonder if she considers this to be a good dream. Anyway, moving on... She's 'intelligent', in the sense that she can remember pointless trivia, and answer questions with the 'morally good' nonsense that the instructors have already decided is the 'correct' answer. And she can repeat the answers fed to her on written exams. She's like one of those kids from a Civilian School: Intelligent enough to follow simple instructions, avoid getting their hands dirty, and repeat what they're told when it comes to multiplication tables and morality, and stupid enough to think this makes them smarter and instantly better than everyone else. But ask her to play Shogi with you, and she'll lose. Ask her to spar, and she'll say no. I don't need a walking folder full of trivia, I'm smart enough on my own. I want Pawns, Knights, Rooks and Bishops that'll follow my orders! And a Queen! For the record, those are chess pieces. It's like the way-better foreign version of Shogi they play overseas. My parents have some contacts overseas, and we love a good game, even though the pieces have stupid names. Anyway, Sakura's on a 'Slim quickly' diet, even though she's a growing girl AND a Shinobi and she should be eating more and working out instead of trying, and failing, to attract the attentions of a certain classmate. And she should try to become an awesome Ninja in her own right, not some lame loser who'll get saved by her teammate 24/7 until he eventually gets tired and 'Accidentally' doesn't manage to save her in time. I don't want a lame loser like that!"

"Come on, she's not that bad, right?" Hamada asked uncertainly. Sure, that sounded bad, but... she was a girl!

Logic had somewhat failed in this scenario, and so, it was time for what Ryukatsu knew would be a trump card against someone like him. "At her current rate, she'll be completely flat when she grows up." Ryukatsu stated flatly.

"On the other hand, how about the blonde girl, Ino?" Hamada said suddenly, having predictably lost all interest in Sakura. "She's cute."

"And already spoken for." Ryukatsu sighed. "Even though her mind-related Jutsu would be really useful for interrogation and mind-control, she'll be stuck with Chouji and his lazy boss Shikamaru."

"Well, uh... who else is there?" Hamada asked. "Those are the only ones who really jump out at me."

"Possibly because they're the loudest?" He chuckled. His new friend laughed, too. It felt nice, even if Ryukatsu did wish their first friendly conversation would be about something more intelligent than this. "Anyway, the only other girls are Hinata- Which I do not want, she's shy and soft even though she's from the Hyuga Clan, which is an unusual contradiction in itself. I'll be her friend or whatever, but she can't join my team. She's Hyuuga, she'll know Jyuuken and only Jyuuken, just like all the others. No room to make improvements. She can't be the Queen to my King."

"Okay, dude, that is the weirdest-sounding thing you've said so far. These aren't... dolls you can just... sew new heads onto, if you don't like the heads they have now!" Hamada said, somewhat unnerved. "These are girls!"

Ryukatsu only smiled in response. "You like dolls, don't you?"

"...Yes." Hamada said sadly, ashamed, his previous objection forgotten.

"I'm okay with it." Ryukatsu shrugged. "There are a lot of things I'm okay with. But I'm not okay with lameness. Hyugas are lame. They all only know Jyuuken. Once you've fought one, you might as well have fought them all. Once you Genjutsu them, you set them on fire, and they're screwed. Actually, I'm pretty sure the plural is Hyuga, but I don't care. If I'm going to win a Chess game using only three pieces, they need to be good pieces."

"What the heck is chess?" Hamada asked.

"I already told you! It's the foreign version of Shogi, it's a lot more complex, they play it overseas! It's a big hit in Crown Country." Ryukatsu snapped, and then returned to normal. Hamada started to wonder if this mood-swinging was normal for him. "Anyway, back to the task at hand... Hinata wouldn't be a good match for our team. Her Byakugan would be useful for detecting Ninja, and maybe her Jyuken would be useful for disabling opponents and performing nonlethal takedowns, but that's about it. The thing is, I know an enemy-sensing jutsu, so we've got that covered already. It's a pulse, it works on seeing shapes and sensing chakras instead of sight, so I can't see who the enemies are, I just know where they are, what they're shaped like, and what they are, so I guess it's not really as good. Plus, because it's a pulse, and I feel how it interacts with its surroundings, it announces my location to anyone within its radius that can sense chakra and knows what they're looking for. All things have _some_ chakra, even inaminate objects, even though only Ninja can really use it properly. Moving on... I don't really want a Clan Kid, I want an unaffiliated Shinobi I can make into a weapon worthy of serving myself and Konoha. And get your mind out of the gutter, she doesn't need to love me, or even like me. She just needs to complete missions with me, and she needs to not die while on those missions. That's all. If she's cool, her being friends with us will be a bonus. Besides, you know who I love."

"Well, so much for the girls with the best hair." Hamada grumbled.

"In what world does that technicolour eyesore have-MOVING ON... Ryukatsu Shogun wondered, snapped when it came to the subject of Sakura(No, he was not bitter over her being called the number one academic student and not him, even though it was just because the staff didn't want the academy to look bad due to how low scores most Kunoichi would get if most testers weren't intentionally lighter on them for fear of a stupid Civilian mother throwing a Civfit), and then he returned to his thinking, seemingly calm once again. "How about one of Sasuke's fangirls?"

"No way, they like Sasuke." Hamada shrugged.

"Meh, that's okay. Having personal relations with a teammate would just complicate matters." Ryukatsu decided.

"Yeah, I guess. I mean, what if one of us got her pregnant?" Hamada asked.

There was a list of things Ryukatsu was expecting Hamada to say, and that was not on it. He wasn't even sure how to react to that, though his eyes widened a little, so he assumed that counted.

"Do you think we'd have to take care of her and feed her until we can go back to going on missions? Or do you think there's a special section of the hospital for pregnant Kunoichi, and the Ninja doctors use secret jutsu to force the baby to grow quickly, making the Kunoichi give birth in a day instead of six months, so she and her team can get back to their missions sooner?" Hamada wondered.

"I... have... no idea." Ryukatsu answered honestly, genuine surprise on his face and in his voice. "What would they have to eat, to fill their bodies with enough nutrients to give birth that quickly? A day is way too short, even with Ninjutsu. I bet it'd be more like three or four months, if the pregnant bodies were modified to focus more on the baby's birth than the body's physical capabilities. Also, pregnant women can feed themselves."

"Good." Hamada said.

...Ryukatsu had no idea what to make of this, but he didn't feel like changing the subject intentionally just yet.

"You know what'd be a lot more likely? If there was some kind of medical ninjutsu that could transfer a fertilized egg or fetus to another woman's womb and get that woman to voluntarily accept it and gradually raise it internally and eventually give birth to it, so the donor could go back to her missions the next day while the superior Ninja genes were maintained by the jutsu, and the baby would be cared for by that volunteer on days when the kid couldn't see her real mother." Ryukatsu said, surprised that he was now giving genuine thought to such a weird subject. Maybe if they kept talking about it, it'd get less awkward?

"Do you think the donor would be a civilian, or a Ninja with no missions that month?" Hamada asked.

"Probably a Ninja. If civilians could do that, wouldn't there be a Union for it?" Ryukatsu asked, and realized that it was only getting more awkward with each word. "OKAY, WE ARE CHANGING THE SUBJECT BEFORE I SWALLOW THE SUN." He declared stiffly.

"Huh?" Hamada asked.

 _'Great, he stopped talking. And now for the third...'_ Ryukatsu thought, charging chakra into his eyes to sharpen his vision, his eyes scanning the playground as he released a sensory chakra pulse, which checked the chakra of everyone he saw and accidentally dispersed the chakra charged in his eyes in the process, causing him to have to send chakra back into his eyes and make a mental note of that for later. Nobody really stood out to his metaphorical mind's eye at first, but to his physical eyes...

 _That one._ He thought, his eyes locking on to her.

Her long, straight dark hair was pulled into a single loose ponytail at her back with a horizontal fringe at the front of her face, a ponytailed version of a hime-cut. Her arms were folded over her slim chest, and her vibrant purple eyes were somewhat dark and serious, though not overly so. She was wearing a simple black dress with four seams along the front, back and sides, to allow her legs full range of movement, though it still looked like a dress when she stood still. Concealed by her dress(But not concealed to his chakra-sight-sensory-pulse-thing-in-need-of-a-good-name), two kunai holsters were strapped to her left and right upper leg. He could tell from the pattern of the ripped fibres that she'd made that dress's leg-seam herself with a kunai, and she looked... different from the other fangirls. Less angry/obsessive, but more... forceful? Regardless, he sensed a strength within her, a strength few others in the nearby area had. Not A TON of strength, but it was there, and it was better than nothing. ...What was her name again?

"Her." Ryukatsu decided, and walked towards her. Hamada followed behind him, though as more of a curious observer than anything else.

When they reached her, Hamada spoke first while Ryukatsu was still thinking of what to say. "Hey, are you using Ninjutsu? Because that smile is glowing." Hamada flirted with a cheesy smile. Ryukatsu's irises and pupils shrunk as his body seized up and he realised this problem would need to be addressed, and soon. Still, better it was dealt with now than on his first mission.

She immediately went on the defensive, unfolding her arms and bending her right arm over her chest as if holding an invisible kunai. "What the heck are you talking about? You'd better not be trying to flirt with me, alright? My heart belongs to Sasuke."

Ryukatsu Shogun facepalmed. "Let me do the talking, Hamada." He sighed. He then looked at the girl, smiled, and asked, "Hey, uh..." He paused for a moment, and remembered, snapping his fingers as he flashed a confident and friendly smile taken straight from a girl's manga, not that it seemed to help. "Ari Shinkiro, right?"

"Yeah." She confirmed.

"You like Sasuke, right, Ari?" He asked.

"Well, duh!" The girl snapped.

"Why?" Ryukatsu asked as he dropped the smile and looked at her with wide eyes, seeming to be genuinely curious.

"What do you mean, why?" She asked in rage, as if his ignorance of Sasuke's coolness was an insult against him. "It's because he's only the fastest, strongest, coolest, most skillful, and most badass Shinobi avenger OF ALL TIME. And by the way, it's just Shinkiro."

Ryukatsu's expression returned to that kind smile. ' _Yeah, I've got my work cut out for me here.'_ Ryukatsu thought ruefully. ' _Still, the wanting-a-badass thing isn't that bad a reason... Yeah, I can work with this. "I'm Ryukatsu Shogun, and I'm a genius. A real genius, not just some kid with a bloodline and a few high-rank Jutsu.'_ "What's your name, and why are you good enough for Sasuke?"

"Because I love him more than anyone else, that's why." She pouted, folding her arms.

"Uh-huh. And how's that working out so far?" Ryukatsu asked in a manner not laced with sarcasm, but casually and conversationally. It wasn't an insult, it was a friendly question, and that's exactly how he wanted it to sound.

That got to her, though she quickly covered it up. "Oh please. What would you know about love?!" She asked.

"I know everything. Plus, I'm a guy, I know how guys think." Ryukatsu said, willfully ripping off most of the bad romance novels he'd ever read(Out of pure scientific curiosity, really! Totally not out of a desire to know what love is) for that line and genderflipping it to fit. "Let me guess... You were told he likes meek, thin, submissive civilian ladies who'll raise all eight of his Uchiha kids while he's out on missions?"

"Yeah." She confirmed. "I mean, not eight, bu-"

Ryukatsu burst into laughter, and her frown deepened. Excellent. Make them doubt the lie. Make it a lie. Reveal the truth gradually, the better and brighter truth. Your truth. "Who told you that obvious lie? Some girl that wanted her rivals barking up the wrong tree? Sasuke doesn't like losers like that! What real ninja would? Come on, have you _seen_ how intense Sasuke gets about training and combat?" 'Oh, she's seen it. She's definitely seen it.' He thought confidently. In a somewhat wistful tone, he asked, "The fire in his eyes, the fire in his heart, the way his cool demeanour just bursts into a precise dance of intense perfection when he fights? It makes his heart race, and he wants a girl that can do that for him, too. He likes hot, fast, powerful, badass Kunoichi in a sexy ANBU outfit, one that can will help him avenge his dead family BEFORE he can make a new one. On his list of priorities, avenging ranks way, way way higher than restoring his Clan. Or pretty much anything at all to do with girls. Right now, the losers pining after him like love-struck civilian farmers are so worthless in his eyes, he doesn't even think it's worth telling them to leave him alone. He'd waste too much effort forming those words, effort that could be better spent training or planning his combat strategies for facing Itachi. He wants Kunoichi just as badass as he is to help him hunt down his brother, and take out whatever teammate he has protecting him while the Uchiha brothers have a proper one on one duel, whether that's what Itachi wants or not. And then, after you both kill your enemies, overcome with passion and the rush of victory, you grab him and pick him up with one hand, pin him up onto a nearby tree or wall or whatever and you kiss him. Then you tie him up, take him to the ANBU Interrogation Rooms, put him on the table and... Well, you've read enough romance novels to know where this is going."

"He likes that?!" She asked in wonder. The thought entered her mind, she began to think about it, and the idea appealed to her. "And yeah, that sounds nice, but... but... everyone was so sure-"

"People are idiots. One is smart. Two are smart, if they're listening to the One. Three can be smart, if they listen to the One. But people are stupid, panicky animals, and you know it. It's like a flock of birds... they might be going the wrong way, they might all be idiots, but they never stop to ask for directions, because they don't want to break formation and be an individual. They want to be part of the flock, even if that means silencing the voice in their head called original thought." He said. "Become an awesomely hot Kunoichi that could kick Sasuke's butt with one arm tied behind her back if she wanted to, so it'll mean something when you do 'do the do'. ...Heh heh, 'Doo doo'."

Ryukatsu seemed completely unfazed by what he was saying, and Hamada couldn't help but wonder where he'd read about that stuff.

"Plus, if you do submit to him, it'll mean way more." Ryukatsu said, almost as an afterthought.

Shinkiro was considering his words, but she had to check something. "How... do you know all of this? And no 'I know everything' bull this time, ok? You're a guy. You're all supposed to be completely clueless about this stuff."

"The library's age restrictions don't apply to Ninja. Apparently, if you're old enough to buy kunai with pocket change and toss it into someone's heart on a battlefield, you're old enough to read adult books about love, and romance, and boring stuff like that. Except sometimes it gets way more varied, way more interesting, and way less boring."

"And when you say 'more varied'..." Shinkiro pressed uncertainly, clearly dreading the answer, but needing the confirmation that her suspicions were correct.

"They do weird stuff before or during it, to mix things up. Like this one time, this chick tied herself to the ceiling with chakra rope and then she used the rope to grab the guy's-"

"I DON'T WANT TO KNOW!" Shinkiro shouted, clutching her hands to her head over her ears as she shook her head.

"I kinda want to know." Hamada admitted, smiling sheepishly, and she looked at her like he said he ate corpses.

"Heh heh heh..." Ryukatsu chuckled. "So, what do you say? Are you ready to become a badass?" extending his right arm for a handshake.

She took her hands from her head, stood up, and hesitated for a short moment, before steeling her resolve. She thought of everything she wanted in life, and everything she wanted to be, and it With fire in her eyes, she shook his hand. "I'm in." She said firmly.

"Now that your diet's out of the window, you can eat whatever you want. And Hamada here is freaking rich, so we can eat anything. His parents are paying. So, want to get something to eat after school?" Ryukatsu offered.

She thought about her mother, and had an idea. "All you can eat buffet?" She suggested.

"You know it!" Ryukatsu laughed. He assumed her moment of thinking was simply an internal struggle with the thought of eating, and her diet feeling like second nature due to living with it for so long.

"So, what now?" Hamada asked.

"Now," Ryukatsu said with a pleasant smile on his face, "Drop and give me ten."

"Huh?" Hamada asked.

"Ten push-ups, now!" Ryukatsu yelled furiously, dropping to the ground and following his own orders, glaring up at them with the intensity of someone willing to snap someone's neck over an exercise session. They quickly complied, Shinkiro struggling when she got to number eight, ruining her form and causing the final two to not count, while Hamada just fell to the ground at nine. They got up, and Shogun waited twenty seconds to let them catch their breath before demanding, "Ten more! Now!"

"When we're done with this, sit next to me in class." Ryukatsu ordered as they exercised. "Now give me ten more!" He demanded, not giving them a rest period this time.

"You're insane!" They shouted.

"Oh, am I?" Ryukatsu asked in amusement, and then laughed evilly, using his laughter to cover up how he was already panting, even though he was using chakra to reinforce and empower his own body. He definitely needed to work out more. Maybe using chakra to enhance the muscles and their power wasn't helping as much as using chakra to stimulate nerve endings and force the contractions of muscles would?

 _Later that night..._

Ryukatsu was alone at the library, as usual, two neat and very large stacks of books on either side of him. Hamada and Shinkiro were exercising at home.

"Huh. Well, isn't that something." Ryukatsu said calmly, surprised. He stopped flicking through the book he was reading, and stared at that specific page for a moment. It was a book on psychological conditioning, and it mentioned something about a 'Switch'. A 'Killswitch', to be precise. A technique where, through meditation, the user created a switch inside their mind tied to their emotions. When the Killswitch was on, the user's morality and restraint was turned off. This allowed a Shinobi to act unimpeded by moral codes or guilt or mental limits while on the field, without suffering any mental damage. He could do anything he wanted while his emotions were switched off, and be a completely healthy Shinobi when the mission was over and he was back in the village. Ryukatsu grinned, flicked through the rest of the book, and began practising that technique. He was smart, and his mental health was paramount. Crazy people often made stupid mistakes.

He began meditating, and had this technique down after half an hour of solid meditation.

Ryukatsu decided to test it out on his way home, when he saw a stray Alley Cat, which hissed at him. It was an ugly grey thing with matted fur, and it often scratched other kids. He closed his eyes, switched off his emotions, and felt everything melt away...

He pulled a single metal Shuriken from his pockets and flung then at the cat. The cat jumped back to avoid the thrown weapon-

Ryukatsu threw another shuriken, much quicker than the last one, spinning quickly in the air. Like a rotating sawblade, it tore right through the cat's guts and struck the wall behind it, hitting the wall and bouncing to the ground.

As if it meant nothing at all, Ryukatsu picked up the used Kunai and put them back into his pockets to wash off later. A quick toss of an Immolation Tag burned away all the evidence that the cat had ever truly existed. He walked home, and blinked as he flipped his Killswitch off and felt his emotions come back.

Ryukatsu's eyes widened as his mind returned to normal. He knew he'd just killed a cat in cold blood, but he couldn't find it within him to care, even though he wanted to. He normally liked cats, and all likable animals, but this... didn't matter at all to him. He could still feel, and now he was a little concerned about how he didn't feel anything... And then he got over it. The technique worked exactly as it should have. He had mastered yet another jutsu. He wondered if his teammates were making as much progress as him. He decided to step up their training the next time he saw them, just in case. Maybe something with training weights, like his books recommended. He needed to get some of those for himself, as well. And maybe a sweet Katana, even if he didn't plan on becoming a proper swordsman. Hey, a Ninja was a Ninja, not a Samurai, and he'd find it a lot easier to win fights if a bladed weapon was in his hand. Sure, he had kunai, but katanas were longer, and had that intimidation factor you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

 _Later..._

A twelve-year old Ryukatsu Shogun strode confidently into the Academy's examination room, for today was his day. Today was the day everyone would be assigned to a team. He and his teammates had been working hard, and they had all changed their appearance a great deal, though this was the new unveiling of the official outfits they planned on wearing on missions. Ryukatsu's rosewood hair had been cut into two layers, short at the fringe while the back was grown out to neck-length and pushed back and around, away from his face and out of his field of vision. He had an unbuttoned doctor's labcoat that was a bit loose on him, revealing a replica of a stab-proof black Chunin flak vest, hidden replica ANBU steel arm-guards on his arms that were extended to cover his elbows as well, loose black tracksuit pants, one belt upon which he had four large black hip-pouches and an extra-wide pouch at his back, and a single katana in its sheath all linked to the same belt. Two extra belts crossed over the main belt with two extra black pouches attached to each extra belt's side, and thick rubber boots with 'Steel-toe caps'(A metal-reinforced toe section, between the layers of rubber). The books said that ordinary Shinobi were supposed to wear sandals, but he never liked sandals, the toes were too bare and unprotected. Besides, his new boots were insulated against electricity, they had more grip than an average sandal, seals inside would provide coolness on command, and they had a very high melting point. And while they couldn't currently be seen, he also had two five-pound weights on each leg, two five-pound weights strapped to his arms, he had seals inside the pockets of his trousers and labcoat, his Leaf Village Headband was tied around his right bicep, and he was wearing a protective black plastic cup with two small hidden sheathed extendable blades on the exterior over his white boxer underwear. Everything he wore was for practicality, the added coolness he secretly wanted was an unintentional side benefit.

Right behind him was the team's muscle, Hamada, now dressed how they imagined a badass version of a noble lord would dress when he wanted to keep his asskicking capabilities unimpeded by the fancier decorative pieces he might wear at ceremonies and celebrations. His hairstyle had been changed, his center-parting had a fringe at the front and his blue hair was now in rows of small spikes like a bird's feathers. He was dressed in a dark blue flak vest to match his hair, and he had a black shirt on beneath it. He wore rounded aerodynamic four-inch-thick steel shoulderpads to give the illusion of his shoulders being bigger than they actually were, and he wore dark black trousers with steel kneecaps. He had four bags at his hip on a similar belt to Ryukatsu's main belt, but with no wider fifth bag at the back. Instead, strapped to his back, he had a sharp and regal seemingly-golden(But actually Steel affected by weaponsmithing jutsu to make it appear golden, because gold was actually a really, really terrible weapon to make weapons with) two-headed great axe, inscribed with small silver-looking seals which ran down the weapon's central pole, and had two large silver seals on both flat sides of the weapon's two bladed heads. The weapon was very expensive and worth every penny, even if it was currently far too heavy for him to use properly. Ryukatsu assured him he'd soon be able to swing it one-handed effortlessly, but right now, he could barely swing the thing in a straight line. Hidden beneath his trousers, he had one ten-pound weight strapped to each leg and a five-pound weight strapped to each wrist.

And then, the third. Ari Shinkiro. Her long dark hair in a ponytail was unchanged, and her new Shinobi Headband was tied around her waist, not her hips or forehead, like a decorative second belt. She was dressed almost exactly like a female ANBU BlackOps operative, with black cloth gloves that almost reached her shoulders, metal armour on her arms, a neck and chest covered in similar black fabric and a thick grey flak vest, dark grey trousers with large pockets marked with three weapon seals inside each pocket, and black hardened-leather dress shoes. While they couldn't be seen, she also had a five-pound weight strapped to each leg and a two-point-five-pound weight on each wrist, and she kept two thin and sharp extendable triangular blades hidden inside the interior of her shoes, and they'd extend when her toes pressed a hidden button.

The three made sure to sit right next to each other, right in front of where Shikamaru, Ino, and Chouji were sitting, with Ryukatsu at the center in front of Shikamaru, Hamada at his right in front of Chouji, and Shinkiro at his left in front of Ino. Ryukatsu had them sit there almost every day for the last few years, hoping this would further reinforce the 'These three Shinobi should be teammates' vibe he wanted to give out.

"Hey, where'd you get those clothes?" Ino asked suddenly.

"From a store." Shinkiro said bluntly.

"Hey, Ino, you own a flower shop, right?" Ryukatsu asked suddenly, turning around and getting her attention before Ino could respond.

"Yeah, why?" Ino teased. "Looking to buy something for a 'special someone'?"

"I don't have any of those." He stated flatly. "I do have a crush on someone, but she doesn't like flowers. And she's not from this year. Anyway, many poisons are made from flowers. I don't suppose you'd be willing to let me take a look at your store some time?"

"Sure, but they're not free." She stated.

"Give him what he wants." Shinkiro said in a warning tone.

"Easy, I'll pay for them." Ryukatsu said casually, turning back to face the front of the class. "Well, Hamada will. When's Iruka getting here?"

There was a pause. "Wait, you have a crush on someone?" Ino asked, blinking in surprise. "Who is it?"

"I will not tell you." Ryukatsu stated.

"Is it-" Ino began.

"I will not tell you." Ryukatsu repeated with exactly the same tone and inflection. Ino frowned.

"There's only eleven possibilities to begin with." Shikamaru sighed to Ino, opening his eyes slightly and looking down. "If-

"If she doesn't like flowers, that rules out Ino and Sakura." Ryukatsu interrupted, a small smile forming on his face. "And most of the girls here. They all like flowers for some reason. Meaning there's only four possibilities left. You could cross-reference the personalities of those girls with what little you know about me to weed out the most obvious of the unlikely candidates, then list whoever's left, and examine my reaction to hearing their names, narrowing down the list of possibilities and hoping you get lucky. That might work. If I were the type to react to something so obvious and give away any information, I mean. Besides, that's just too much of a drag... Right, Shikamaru?" Ryukatsu said as his smile grew wider, becoming the smirk of a cat playing with a caught mouse. "But then, you don't care at all, do you? Besides, if you get Ino interested enough, she'll follow me in the hopes of finding clues you can use to deduce who my crush is. Not a wise move, considering how I feel about prying eyes." His smile grew into a wide grin. "Then again, do I have a crush on anyone to begin with? You have no evidence I even have a crush on anyone at all. I might just be screwing with you... for fun."

"...What a drag." Shikamaru sighed.

"What fun." Ryukatsu responded cheerfully. "But hey... If Ino was halfway-competent at her Yamanaka family jutsu, she could attempt to read my mind."

"Hey! Even my dad didn't get that jutsu down until he was thirteen!" Ino protested furiously.

"Really?" Ryukatsu asked, sounding surprised, as Iruka-Sensei entered the room, pausing to make sure he got the last word. "Huh. Well, ok then."

To everyone's surprise, behind Iruka-Sensei, there was Naruto, in a Shinobi headband.

"Hm?" Ryukatsu gave a hm of mild surprise, noticing Naruto was wearing a Shinobi headband. ...Iruka-Sensei's headband. There are only a few ways this could be possible... Ryukatsu thought. After eliminating the impossible and considering the two most likely courses of events... either Naruto stole Iruka-Sensei's headband and Iruka is pretending to not notice... but why... ah. Iruka gave Naruto his own headband out of pity, so he can spend one day pretending to be a real ninja. Or... there's more to this dumb brute than that which meets the eye... and he's earned the right to become a Genin.

"Iruka-Sensei? Naruto is wearing a village headband. Is he a Genin?" Ryukatsu asked.

"Yes, he is." Iruka said proudly. "Naruto Uzumaki has officially earned the rank of Genin."

"Huh." Ryukatsu said, barely even surprised. Internally, he was thanking his lucky stars he wouldn't end up on a team with that dumb blonde. Then again... If he could become a Genin, there was probably something new he'd picked up. Perhaps he'd mastered a jutsu that could compensate for his lack of skill? Or spontaneously unlocked some kind of ridiculously-overpowered Kekkei Genkai that would necessitate being promoted to ANBU Captain at a record-breakingly fast rate? "Is this temporary? Or has he earned this, for real?"

"Yeah, I earned this! I'm a real Genin, permanently! Believe it!" Naruto shouted.

"A permanent Genin, you say?" Ryukatsu said with a sly grin. "That wouldn't surprise anyone here."

There was a short pause, and then everyone burst into laughter. "Wait, no, I meant-" Naruto stammered. "I'm not gonna be a Genin forever! I'm gonna be Hokage some day! Believe it!"

"Is that so?" Ryukatsu asked, amused. "Well then... Good luck with that. If you do become Hokage, would you mind pulling rank and making me the head of... whatever I decide to be head of, at the time?"

"Depends on how much I like you, at the time." Naruto said, narrowing his eyes.

"How irritating." Ryukatsu muttered. "Ah, well, it probably won't matter in the end. You see... I dream of becoming something greater than a Kage."

"And what would that be, huh?" Naruto asked skeptically. "Nothing's greater than the Hokage!"

"I plan on becoming... The Daimyo." Ryukatsu stated with a small, confident smile, his eyes focusing on some far-off point in the distance, something that nobody else could see. "The ruler of all of Hi no Kuni, everything in The Land of Fire, the ultimate ruler of the greatest, largest and most economically prosperous nation on this continent. It may not have the most military strength... but I will change that soon enough. One Ninja may be equal to an army... But I am equal to an unstoppable military campaign."

"Huh? But you're not nobility, you can't become a Daimyo!" Sakura protested.

Ryukatsu stopped, turned slowly, and stared at her. "Do you think I don't know this?" He asked quietly. "It's a dream. Not a goal."

"Oh crap." Hamada whispered, eyes widening. Shinkiro smiled, and then stopped smiling when she remembered they were in the middle of a classroom right now.

"Do you only exist to point out the obvious?" Ryukatsu asked Sakura, stretching his fingers outwards and back, then clenching his fists, then stretching his fingers again.

"Uh..." Hamada said, quickly looking around the room in panic. His eyes settled on Naruto's headband. "Hey, Naruto, you've got a headband! How'd that happen?"

"The details of Naruto's promotion are an E-Class Secret." Iruka stated, getting a register out from the desk, a register containing the names of every student, their new Jonin Sensei, and where they would meet said Sensei. "However, he or any Jonin can share them with anyone they like."

"Only an E-Class secret?" Ryukatsu said, surprised as he looked away from Sakura and looked back at the suddenly-more-interesting Iruka. "There are no legal penalties for those."

"Because it's not much of a secret, really." Iruka said. "But it IS his to tell."

Ryukatsu had observed enough of Naruto's stupid, loud personality to know exactly which buttons to push. Well, he had a general idea of which ones to push. "Huh. A story like that must be pretty crazy..." He said, seeming open and surprised, and then he reverted to a faint smugness. "But I bet I've heard better."

"Oh yeah? Tell me you've heard better than this: Mizuki was a traitor to the village, and he tried to steal some Scroll while disguised as me. I helped Iruka-Sensei catch the guy, AND I kicked his ass." Naruto explained.

"...That's all?" Ryukatsu asked curiously, a little disappointed. He then smiled and said, "Well, if you owned an instructor, that is pretty cool. And if I knew I could have skipped the Academy by hunting down a traitor and tearing a teacher apart, I would have done that long ago!"

"Oh yeah? And where would you look for a traitor?" Naruto asked doubtfully.

"Obviously, you'd start with the people with access to the good stuff. Important documents, mission scrolls that could confirm when a Ninja did or didn't do something, important people so important that if they died, life would suck for the village. Then, you'd work your way down, in order of who's likeliest to be a spy. You'd check each one, without killing them, since we do have mind-readers in the village. Nobody needs to bring out the hot senbon or public red-light Mist Village stocks. After that, use the captured spies however you want. Maybe after beating them down if there's a fight." Ryukatsu stated. "I bet you could ransom their bodies back to their villages, or extract their secrets if they were something cool or knew something good."

"Obviously." Sakura said, unimpressed.

"Did we ask you to speak?" Shinkiro asked, irritated. And then she turned around, glaring at her. "You know what? Shut up and come at me."

Sakura opened her mouth to speak.

"No." Shinkiro interrupted, making a rude hand gesture at her, and then beckoning towards herself with that extended finger. "Don't speak, come at me. People like you talk big and accomplish nothing. What are you gonna do, throw insults at me? The worst you can do is annoy me, and if you actually have the balls to walk outside and fight me, I'll show you why that's the worst thing you can do. So come at me, or I'll never take you seriously as a Ninja, and neither will anyone else in this room."

Silence reigned in the classroom for a moment as Sakura's face made a furious expression, and then Shinkiro turned to her teacher. "Iruka-Sensei, I apologise for my outburst. May Sakura and I duel outside?"

"Hey, Ryu?" Hamada quietly asked Ryukatsu. "Why's she been like this to the other girls these past few weeks? Is-"

"She really, really wants Sasuke to see her kick someone's ass." He explained, interrupting what he predicted his friend would say. "It'll look a little cooler if she's not the one to start the fight."

"Oh." He said. "Yeah, now I get it."

"Today's the day you're assigned to your teams. Do you really want to show up exhausted?" Iruka asked.

"I won't be exhausted, and I won't hurt her too bad." Shinkiro shrugged.

"Maybe I'LL hurt YOU bad!" Sakura shouted back.

"You sure about that?" Shinkiro asked curiously. She got up, walked out of the room, and in clear view of everyone, flipped Sakura off. She headed towards the nearest playground, where the fight would take place.

All was quiet for a monent, and then-

"Cat-FIGHT!" Hamada called out in excitement, taking the path Shinkiro had taken. The rest of the children followed him, and so did Iruka, though he planned on watching over the fight, not just watching it.

"Yo, Chouji!" Ryukatsu called suddenly.

"Yeah?" He asked, surprised that he was called.

"This fight would go great with some popcorn. Got any?" Ryukatsu asked.

"No, I only have chips. Some barbeque flavour, and some salted." He admitted.

"Damn, popcorn would be awesome right now. Ah, well." The rosewood-haired boy shrugged as they made it to the playground, the rough sandy area of ground now serving as a battlefield. Shinkiro was waiting in the center, and the crowd instinctively formed around it. Sakura stepped forward, and pointed at her. "Alright, I don't know what your problem is-"

"What did I say about talking?" Shinkiro asked.

"I'll talk if I want! Are you doing this because I'm the number one academic student in this year, and not your precious Ryukatsu?"

Shinkiro said nothing, but her eyebrows rose. With her right hand, she made the Seal Of Confrontation, and then turned it to be a baring of her middle finger to her opponent, who angrily responded with the same symbol, followed by the same variation.

"Oooooh..." Some in the crowd said.

"She pushed the Ryukatsu button!" Hamada declared, grinning as he glanced to Ryukatsu.

"You shouldn't have done that." Ryukatsu replied, having understood that reference. That show was the best radio play ever, its writers living comfortably in Konoha.

"Sakura..." Shinkiro said with the air of a parent tired of their child messing around. "Stop trying to fool yourself. You're not the best Ninja, or the smartest, or even an okay Ninja. You're a stupid civilian girl with a textbook civilian attitude. You're going into a world where only the strong and swift survive, and you're going to be utterly useless to your team, if you don't end up outright almost killing one with your own incompetence."

"Dude, did you teach her that?" Hamada whispered to Ryukatsu.

"No, this is all her." Ryukatsu replied, seeming sincere.

"You know what?!" Sakura asked angrily. "No! I'm a Ninja too, and I'm as much as a fighter as you are! Let's do this!" Sakura declared, swinging a wild brawler's punch at her opponent's face. "Chaaaa!"

As cool as the visual would have been if she had grabbed that haymaker and miraculously negated its force completely, like people did so often in fiction, the power of her protagonist power and rightness empowering her in the physical clash, that wasn't what she was trained for, nor did she live in a fantasy world where the laws of physics stopped existing when they would be inconvenient. As a Ninja of Konoha, it was very likely that she'd have to fight opponents larger and stronger than her. Therefore, her chosen fighting style prioritised evasion and swift counters over blocking, and kunai strikes over pretty much anything that wouldn't help to get a kunai strike in. And so, while the pink-haired girl threw her wild haymaker, Shinkiro's much faster body threw a straight jab at her chest, aimed right at the heart.

Sakura stumbled back in surprise, and Shinkiro followed it up with a semi-crouching rotating haymaker to the gut. "'Cha'?" She wondered, amused. "What is that, your battle cry? Are we in a manga now?"

When Sakura's breathing had returned to normal, her body filled with rage. She swung her fist at the side of Shinkiro's face, and she leaned back just in time while smirking down at her foe, putting her own body weight on her rear leg, before ducking below the punch and springing forwards for a punch to her sternum.

"Check it out, it's like I'm a Hyuga to this girl!" Shinkiro said in amusement as her opponent struggled to breathe. "Eight Triagrams, Ten Thousand Middle Fingers!" She declared, flipping her off with both hands, and then uppercutting her jaw with her left. Now opened up, Shinkiro found it easier to throw a few more jabs to her foe's body in an almost playful manner, and finally, she went for a straight right that knocked the weaker girl down to the ground.

Despite the pain she was in, Sakura raised her body up with her elbows, and glared up at her opponent.

"You suck, Sakura. You're a weak, pathetic joke, and I want you to understand WHY." "You're lame. Really, really lame. This world is a violent meat grinder that kills people. If this place's Genin Exam was anything like the Bloody Mist's, you'd be dead right now."

Ryukatsu decided not to mention how the time periods were wrong for that, and the survival-of-the-fittest exams had been cancelled for quite some time, even if that wasn't really common knowledge or something cool to say.

"TRAIN MORE, YOU IDIOT! Do you even lift? Were you paying attention in Taijutsu class? This has got to be the lamest fight I've ever been in. I haven't even used any jutsu yet. You lack resolve. You lack determination. You lack a freakin' personality, too! Come on, you're supposed to be the smartest Kunoichi in class, right? Doesn't look like it, from where I'm standing. Come on, show me something interesting. Pull out some neat trick that could save your life! IMPRESS ME!"

"That's enough!" Naruto yelled, suddenly barging into the makeshift arena. "Leave Sakura alone!"

The crowd didn't seem impressed by this.

"What is that idiot doing?" One guy asked, one nobody knew the name of.

"What's he gonna do, embarass himself until she leaves them alone?" Some girl asked.

"This should be good." Hamada commented sarcastically. He wasn't exactly a fan of Naruto, but then again, nobody was.

"Okay, first of all, no." Shinkiro said, disgusted by Naruto's interruption. "How can you defend this loser? Don't you remember how many times she's hit you?"

"Yes, and I don't care!" Naruto declared.

"Naruto, get back!" Iruka ordered sternly.

"Huh?" Naruto asked in surprise.

"Look, this is a serious duel and our prides are at stake. If you take her place, you're telling her you don't think she can hack it as a Ninja. And you're undercutting my point about fighting for yourself and not intentionally trying to play the damsel role. I hate losers like that. Do you really think she's that weak?"

That wasn't something Naruto was expecting. "No, I-"

"This is something she has to do herself, I'll fight you later if you want, 'kay?" She asked understandingly.

"I don't want to fight you, I just-" Naruto tried to clarify.

"Wanted to look good in front of her? Look, I get it. But-" Shinkiro began.

"GO AWAY, NARUTO!" Sakura snapped, struggling to get up.

"S-Sakura-chan?!" Naruto said in surprise.

"Iruka-Sensei?" Shinkiro asked.

"She's right. Naruto, come back." Iruka said solemnly. When Naruto was back at his side, he whispered just loud enough for only the blonde's slightly-enhanced senses to hear, "Your heart was in the right place. Even if your head wasn't."

Meanwhile, Shinkiro was loving the idea of fighting a fully-enraged Sakura. "And here we go! Goodbye, sweet civilian mask, and hello, violent psycho!" Shinkiro said happily. "Good to see Naruto's dumb kindness brought out your dumb meanness as usual. Iruka-Sensei, can we get some Kunai?"

"No." He said quickly and sternly.

"Crap." She said, looking forward to a good knife-fight.

Sakura screamed and threw a punch at her foe's face with all she had, somewhere between a slug and a straight. Shinkiro evaded it and thrust a heel at the girl's abdomen, sending her down and winding her.

"Wow, you really do suck." Shinkiro said in surprise. "I thought you'd have SOME kind of redeeming quality, maybe some seal attacks, maybe some special move or jutsu, but... no. You're just the same boring, weak, pathetic, plain old Sakura you were so many years ago."

Sakura struggled to get up, but Shinkiro wasn't having any of it. Once she was up, Shinkiro placed a foot on the pink-haired girl's chest and shoved the her away, like she was nothing more than trash to a Kunoichi of her level. "What a disappointment."

Sakura tried to get up, and Shinkiro was there to kick her back down. "Sakura, stay down, or I'll kick your knee out." Shinkiro threatened.

From the ground, Sakura glared up at her, but she stayed down.

And Shinkiro watched her.

"Come on... Say something." Shinkiro ordered.

"Oh, _now_ you want me to talk?" Sakura asked angrily.

"Yes, I want you to swear that you'll never lose again. Something cool, like that. Yell it to the sky, to the whole world! Resolve to train more, pick up some Ninja skills, suck less from now on, and to not be a massive burden on your teammates."

"Fine." Sakura growled.

"Don't just promise it to me. Promise it to yourself, as well. And to everyone here. Swear you'll become better than the loser you were a minute ago. Do you really want to be the reason whatever team you end up on fails all their missions? Do you want to get your teammates killed trying to protect you? And don't you REALLY want to kick my ass next time we fight?"

"Fine, damn it!" Sakura snapped. "I swear on my pride as a Shinobi... I'll never lose again."

"That's all I wanted to hear." Shinkiro said with a smile, holding her right hand out to her, extending her index and middle finger.

Sakura took it, and Shinkiro helped her up- And then pulled her hand away, letting Sakura fall back down. "Stand on your own two feet, BEEYATCH!" She called out, walking toward her teammates, extending her arms horizontally, and then bending her arms up. Ryukatsu and Hamada hi-fived her at the same time, and they walked to the training ground where they would meet their new Sensei.

Author's Notes: Naruto is not actually an idiot, but Ryukatsu has yet to see anything to make him believe otherwise. He's an ordinary Academy Student, and Ryukatsu has no Kekkei Genkai or any overpowered abilities, including the magical ability many OCs have, the ability to 'Just know' relevant information. He is not a Jinchuriki, nor will he become one. Implanted Sharingan will not enter his body. I do not plan on pulling some new clan out of nowhere to grant him an incredible power boost, or give him Hirashin. And no matter what weapons he may create over the course of this story, his most dangerous weapon will always be his mind. Also, you know how the views expressed in this story are not necessarily representations of the author or his views, and that usually goes without saying? And how that goes double for anything incorrect, and triple for pretty much anything out of Jack's mouth? (Some day, I will write that story, no matter what the second-worst fandom on the planet says. I have seen where hesitation and second-guessing leads. Never again.) Yeah. That thing that usually applies everywhere... also applies here. Your relationship with your lover should be somewhat equal, preferring an unequal one is weird. I'm not an equalist, but that just seems preferable to me. Also, I plan on making Sakura cooler, but not to a ridiculous wish-fulfilment degree, or to the point where she's no longer Sakura. Finally, I'm rewriting this. I didn't like how it turned out all these years ago. Things should be better this time.


	2. The Reluctant Sensei! Old VS New!

Ryukatsu, Hamada, and Shinkiro stared down their opponent as Kawasaki, nose still bleeding, left his fighting stance.

And then someone emerged from the bushes, an ANBU agent 5'10'' in height and average in build, an Owl mask covering his face, the green glow of a Chiyute Healing Hands Jutsu around his hands as he casually walked over to what the kids assumed was his friend.

"Uh..." Ryukatsu said as he left his stance, not expecting this at all.

It didn't take long for the Medic-Nin to cure Kawasaki's bleeding nose, force his skin to reabsorb the blood on his face and inside his nose, and send an injection of chakra into his stream to get him back into fighting shape. "What, you actually thought I'd let your kids wear me down until you fought me yourself?" Kawasaki laughed. "Heh, nice try, kid. But no, if we're fighting, you need to prove you can do something to me, WITHOUT risking the lives of your teammates."

"You want me to do something to you?" Ryukatsu asked, eyes narrowing. "Fine. Send your Medic away."

"You know what? Maybe I'll keep him around!" Kawasaki declared.

The ANBU agent in the Owl mask performed The Civilian Handseal with both hands as he walked away, fingers raised in defiance.

"Maybe I WON'T keep him around!" Kawasaki declared in exactly the same tone.

"And you're supposed to teach us." Ryukatsu chuckled, getting back into his own stance.

"You want me to teach you?" Kawasaki wondered, taking his fighting stance once again. "Fine. School-"

"Is now in session, never heard that one before." Ryukatsu mocked as his mind formulated a flowchart plan of likely actions and responses. "How outdated are you? Let's find out."

His plan in mind, the young Ninja charged, to the surprise of everyone around him. "ZEEEEEEEEAAAHHH!" He shouted as he ran right at Kawasaki, charging chakra to his feet for a burst of speed.

Kawasaki smirked. "A simple charge? Really?" He chuckled mockingly. "I ex-"

"SHUUT UUUUUP!" Ryukatsu roared hatefully, charging even more chakra to his feet and legs, so much that his chakra coils began to burn, so much that small fires of chakra flared up around his feet, his footprints burning for a few seconds behind him before fading away. This Genin was going to put all the chakra he had into this, and he didn't care.

Kawasaki, stood there, unimpressed. He was looking forward to letting this runt hit him, and letting him see what good that would do against a body like his. No matter how fast the kid was running before he punched, no matter how much you multiplied a small number, it was still much smaller than whatever number represented how strong you'd have to be before you could hurt him. when he was prepared for an attack And even if it did hurt, the kid was burning himself out way too quickly, he'd be a sitting duck just waiting for a solid punch or kick once his one attack was done.

Kawasaki unfolded his arms when Ryukatsu was only five feet away from him, and time seemed to slow down. The rosewood-haired Genin jumped up, drawing back his right arm for a heavy punch, eyes flickering down and focusing at the center of Kawasaki's chest, showing exactly where the attack was going to be aimed, an attack a sensor-nin could tell would have enough strength to cave in his foe's chest. Kawasaki clenched his fists and tensed his chest muscles up, preparing for the attack-

A log, held sideways in mid-air, collided with Kawasaki's nose, and Ryukatsu was now nowhere to be seen. The former ANBU member stumbled back as the log bounced off him, and fell to the ground at his feet.

"Are you sure you used to be in ANBU?" Ryukatsu's voice asked disdainfully from behind him. Kawasaki turned, and saw that the kid was standing about twelve feet away.

The ANBU immediately figured out what his student had done. He'd leapt at him, albeit at a rather fast(For a lowly Genin) speed, and used one of the basic jutsu every Academy Student was taught, Kawarimi no Jutsu. The Substitution Jutsu. With this, he had substituted himself with a standard-issue Ninja Log, filed down to his exact weight to make said substitution easier on him. Because he was in motion, and the log was not, the momentum was transferred to the substituting object, and that object struck him in the chin. Clever, but ultimately pointless. It didn't even hurt that much. "Do you think one trick is enough to win-" Kawasaki began incredulously.

"Check." Ryukatsu said casually, and performed the single handseal required for detonating explosive tags, sending the chakra signal before the seal was made, burning far more chakra than he needed to in the process.

The log exploded, kicking up a cloud of dust and sending splinters of wood flying outwards like senbon, and Ryukatsu knew it was worth the momentary headache. The faintly-smouldering chakra fires on the floor from Ryukatsu's footsteps vanished immediately, because they were part of a Genjutsu. The explosive log, however, was not, and Kawasaki was pushed back a few feet from the force of the blow, his feet skidding along the ground. When the dust settled, a lot of tiny splinters were embedded in his exposed skin, but instead of causing pain, they only seemed to annoy him. "HOW?!" Kawasaki demanded.

"Is it really so unlikely that I could hide explosives inside the log? It can't be that hard to slice a standard-issue Ninja Log in half and hollow it out a little, hide a few pieces of chakra-infused exploding tags inside, and glue the edges back together, right?" An amused Ryukatsu asked. "Surely, this can't be the first time in Shinobi World History that anyone ever thought of that! I'd better keep that secret technique under wraps, just like all my other secret techniques that can guarantee instant death when I use them at full power!"

Ryukatsu dashed forwards again, and now that all Genjutsu had been cleared from Kawasaki's body and mind, the older Ninja was shocked for a moment at how fast things could suddenly move, and wondered if he was under a Genjutsu, and if so, how much of the fight had been illusionary. The dashing Ryukatsu swung a chakra-enhanced right hook at Kawasaki's face, applying a Genjutsu through touch. It hit hard, moving the guy's head a little but not knocking him down, and Kawasaki heard the sound of shifting earth behind him. He looked back to see an Earth Clone of Ryukatsu leap from the ground with a kunai ready, to try and stab at the center of the older Ninja's neck. Kawasaki kicked the clone bodily and turned it to a falling pile of earth. Except not really, because that was a Genjutsu. In reality, Ryukatsu had crouched down, taken a moment to charge four times as much chakra into his fists and legs, and he put all he had into a harsh right hook at the Jonin's side, pretty sure he'd struck a kidney. A moment after his fist made contact, one of Ryukatsu's Earth Clones leapt up from the ground in front of Kawasaki while delivering a powerful uppercut to Kawasaki's chin, having been given a boost by four more clones while underground, each pressing with the strength of his legs and arms, throwing their whole body and all of their chakra-enhanced strength into this attack. In addition to a basic Genjutsu that targeted the center of the brain that controlled balance, this Earth Clone put so much force into this strike, he broke his own in the process and turned to earth. Kawasaki staggered a few steps back toward the real Ryukaysu and tried to turn towards him as quickly as he could in his dizzied state. The real Ryukatsu jumped backwards and crossed his arms as he flexed his wrists, and then he suddenly had three Kunai with explosive tags attached in each of his hands. He swung his arms outwards and threw them all at the ANBU, aiming them at the older ninja's feet. The ANBU saw the attack, jumped up and back and he braced himself at the very moment Ryukatsu detonated his explosives, the chakra-enhanced shockwaves assaulting his body, and Kawasaki used a good deal of chakra to reinforce his own body, so that instead of getting scattered over a wide area, he was only flung upwards around twelve feet into the air.

"Raging Dragon Typhoon: Chinatsu!" The real Ryukatsu (Kawasaki suspected and hoped) shouted, performing handseals for a powerful C-Rank Earth Dragon Jutsu attack while not putting in any chakra, providing a distraction.

An ignored Hamada looked at his axe uncertainly, trying to remember what he did during that move and if he even did do anything, while an ignored Shinkiro dashed towards her target. The sound of her footsteps caught Kawasaki's attention, and he looked back just in time to almost miss a kunai thrown by Ryukatsu, a kunai he leaned back to dodge. Shinkiro rapidly went through a set of six handseals, and Kawasaki watched those hands as well as he watched the rest of her, but didn't recognize any Jutsu that used the handseals she'd used. She then drew two Kunai as she leapt up towards Kawasaki, who had reached the peak of his arc and had begun to fall. When she reached the peak of her jump, about eight feet off the ground, she flung both kunai at Kawasaki, one aimed at his heart and one aimed at his gut. As the kunai sailed towards him, Kawasaki began to draw his hands together for a handseal-

A kunai glowing with blue chakra suddenly appeared inside his body, having sunk deep into Kawasaki's right shoulder. Another one appeared in that same moment, spiking through his lower left arm, severing just about every important nerve and a good deal of flesh, sinking quite deeply into the bone before stopping. He screamed, because that genuinely did hurt a lot, he wasn't expecting it, and he was not at all prepared for this. Not even a little. The kunai she'd originally thrown flickered and dissipated into thin air once they touched his gut, revealing themselves to be illusionary. A few seconds too late, he realised the handseals she'd made were unimportant, it was just a trick to get her to look at her hands. She'd sent a genjutsu through her finger, just like his old(Well, young) colleague used to do on occasion. Now, where did she learn that? Her file said she wasn't a Genjutsu specialist, and she didn't particularly have any real abilities or natural talents that stood out, making her worthless to Konoha. All Cs across the board, like most Kunoichi these days, except for a barely-worth-mentioning C+ in speed and stamina. Her file said she should have been mere chaff to be removed from the wheat, like most of Sasuke's fangirls... right? How could he be losing to someone like this so badly? And Hamada, he was the favourite son of a rich man and one of his many wives, he didn't belong in a school for Ninja! And Ryukatsu... Since when did mentally unstable people like him come up with such good ideas?

In any case, with his arms now taken out of the picture, performing handseals and saving himself was now completely out of the question. And while he could easily get this thing healed, there was no way in this or any hell he would call off the match and give that smug little git the satisfaction of beating him.

"Summer's over." Ryukatsu stated, grinning viciously as his eyes widened, like some predatory animal about to pounce on a terrified, fleeing animal, the beast looking forward to devouring what would soon be its next meal. Yes, Ninjutsu were certainly powerful, but they all had one major weakness: The user needed to be able to move their arms and perform precise hand movements to use them. Well, most of them had that weakness. When he was more powerful and knowledgeable, he hoped to devise a Jutsu he could actually pull off that didn't need handseals, or at the very least, usage of one's arms or hands.

Kawasaki landed face-first on the ground, and then slowly got up, his arms hanging uselessly by his sides.

"You're already dead." Ryukatsu said ominously.

Kawasaki raised an eyebrow, as if to say, 'Seriously? Are you kidding me?'.

Then he noticed the Kunai sunk into the ground at his own feet, with five notes attached. Four notes had the black-ink symbol required for explosive tags, and the fifth was a similar-sized note that had 'Screw you' written on it in big black letters, the symbols for saying such a thing in katakana above the characters.

"Substitution jutsu!" Kawasaki barked, chakra flaring up around him as he forcibly cast the Substitution jutsu on himself and Ryukatsu. Normally, that jutsu only worked on inanimate objects, unless a huge skill/chakra difference was involved, or if the target consented to being teleported. The difference between an Ex-ANBU Jonin and a consenting Genin fresh out of the Academy who felt the Jutsu target him and decided to work with it was definitely a large enough gap. Kawasaki and Ryukatsu instantly teleported, switching places, leaving the Genin within blasting range of his own explosive.

Completely unfazed and unsurprised, Ryukatsu casually tossed a Kunai into the air as if tossing fruit peel over his shoulder, and then performed the same handseal. The difference between a Genin with a focused mind and a lot of Chakra control putting all of his effort into the jutsu and an injured and distracted Ex-ANBU Jonin both in a lot of pain and putting in hardly any effort at all was definitely a large enough gap. "Kawarimi no Jutsu." Ryukatsu said.

The two ninja switched places again, and then that kunai landed blade-first on Kawasaki's unstabbed shoulder, two inches entering his skin. He grunted from the pain, but refused to scream.

And then the hidden explosive tag seals at his feet went off, and he did scream.

When the smoke cleared, Kawasaki was a mess. Clothing ripped and shredded, skin burned and even charred in some places. He angrily grabbed the kunai sticking out of his shoulder with his teeth, ignoring the pain and the blood that came from the wound. Visible chakra flared up around him as he howled in rage, and he charged right at Ryukatsu, the Genin that had put him through so much pain and humiliation.

"King in check." Ryukatsu stated as he got a black 500ml glass container with a cork and no label out of his right pocket, casually tossed it high up into the air, went through a set of six handseals, and slammed his palms to the ground. "Earth Style: Dragon Spear Jutsu."

Just as Kawasaki got within six feet of Ryukatsu, and the thrown bottle fell down and became level with Kawasaki's hips about five feet in front of Ryukatsu, a thin seven-foot lance of earth erupted from the ground one foot in front of Ryukatsu and pierced the black bottle, shattering it effortlessly on its path towards its real target. Thick black goo from the bottle coating the spike's tip, it struck Kawasaki in the chest and shot right through him. And then, two spikes spread out from the spike's tip like a large pickaxe, making sure its victim couldn't push himself off.

Kawasaki screamed in unbearable agony as the black liquid entered his bloodstream.

"Can you feel that?" Ryukatsu asked eagerly. "Can you feel the poison searing at your insides?"

Suddenly, rows of backwards-facing barbs shaped like scales suddenly emerged from the lance in a wave, starting at the pickaxe and heading back towards Kawasaki, damaging his body further.

"YES, I CAN FEEL IT!" Kawasaki shouted at him, his face twisted with pain, wishing he could move his arms and use a Jutsu or try to crush the earthen spike with his chakra-enhanced bare hands, anything to make the pain stop.

"But wait, I thought you were a former member of ANBU BlackOps!" Ryukatsu said in amusement. "I thought you were trained to resist pain!"

"I AM, DAMN IT!" He shouted. "What is this?!"

"I'll tell you if you make me Team Captain. Also, I won't 'Accidentally' murder you."

"Fine." Kawasaki growled.

"What was that? I don't think everyone heard you." Ryukatsu said.

"FINE!" He snapped. "Ryukatsu Yamakuri, you're Team Captain!"

"Do you agree to follow my orders, teach my team's members to the best of your abilities, make sure we take missions suited to our level, and most of all... get the hell over whatever your problem is?"

"Fine!"

"Say yes."

"YES!"

"Now say, 'Hai, Ryukatsu-Sama!'!"

"Hai, Ryukatsu-Sama!" Kawasaki yelled weakly.

"Okay, do you want this antidote?" Ryukatsu asked, getting a similar-shaped peach-coloured bottle out of his left pouch.

"Yes! Give it to me!" He demanded.

Ryukatsu put the peach bottle back in his pouch, and smiled. "You're a moron, and you've been 'poisoned' with 'smokey-bacon'-flavoured lubricant... with several dozen tablespoons of salt, chilli powder and black food-colouring added in. Honestly, I'm amazed you fell for it." Ryukatsu in amusement, and then his smile grew. "...That was sarcasm, I'm not amazed at all. Hamada owes me Fifty Thousand Ryo."

"He's right, I do." Hamada said casually, trying not to look too upset. "But I don't care, that's barely pocket change to me!"

"YOU'RE GAMBLING?!" Kawasaki spluttered. "But-You-What-WHAT?!"

"I had the bottles with me all along, I just needed a chance to use them. And I'd already made the bet months ago, when I first told Hamada about it."

"Prove it." Kawasaki growled.

To prove it, he got the peach-coloured bottle out from his left pouch and removed the cork, then took a swig from it. He put the cork back in, and smiled. "Still delicious." He stated.

"Where did you get a bacon-flavoured-" Kawasaki began incredulously.

"I INVENTED IT!" Ryukatsu snapped. "At age 11. I was bored. And hungry. And I own the patent thanks to Hamada's help. If you want your chain weapons, armour, sword and sheath, mechanical crap, or door hinges to taste like bacon or peaches, use it. If you use it for anything else, you have sullied the good name of bacon and peaches, and I will hate you forever."

"What kind of sword needs a lubricant to slide out properly?" Shinkiro asked, somewhat surprised that this, of all things, was the first thing she was asking.

"The crappy third-rate discount kind." Ryukatsu said. "And... Old swords, I guess. Or anyone who thinks bacon-flavoured lube would be a good replacement for sword-polish. Oh, I remember the day I made the bet like it was yesterday..."

"Behold, the greatest weapon ever!" Ryukatsu Yamakuri boasted to Hamada in Training Ground Four, a secluded and densely forested area with tree roots coating the uneven ground, a terrible place for a fight, but a good place to train for such a location and a great place to do something or show something you didn't want others to see. holding up a small glass bottle of black liquid about the size of a syrup bottle. Shinkiro was in the trees, her form a black blur that leapt from branch to bark as she ran laps around the area while exercising her chakra control, reserves, and legs. Even the slightest mistake would send her falling to the ground, but she wasn't thinking about that, the only thing on her mind was the situation at hand. "And not just because I made it." Ryukatsu stated.

"Cool!" Hamada declared, admiration shining in his eyes. "...What is it? Does it blow up, like most of your stuff?"

"My stuff only blows up because I want it to." Ryukatsu insisted, remembering his first attempts at crafting his own puppet, something that, in retrospect, seemed like an obvious thing to try and master with his skillset. Unfortunately, building things was difficult, and his first idea for a bomb-launcher functioned a lot more like a living demolition bomb. "And because I like explosions. They're pretty- cool, no, they're extremely cool. And the ability to use something as chaotic and all-destroying and indiscriminate and clumsy as an explosion in a strategic manner is a sign of true genius. Anyway, as I was saying... Behold, the ultimate weapon... The deadliest poison known to ninja-kind! The second it enters an opponent's wound, it burns with incredible pain, and it just gets worse and worse with each second! A single drop could make a wild elephant uproot a tree, and then bludgeon itself to death with that tree, just to make the pain stop! It's made from the concentrated sap of ten thousand Kusobaka flowers, which can only be found deep in the forests of Kusokagure!"

"Wow, that-Waaaaiiit a second..." Hamada said suspiciously, narrowing his eyes and pointing at Ryukatsu as he mentally translated the syllables Ryukatsu had just used. "You're just messing with me right now, aren't you?"

"Hamada, please." Ryukatsu said, shrugging and smiling.

Hamada's suspicious expression didn't let up. Ryukatsu waited for four more seconds, then decided he'd earned it.

"I made the whole thing up, it's just a bluff." Ryukatsu admitted with a chuckle. "But it'll fool anyone. Because it hurts so much. And because I have the 'maaaaagical antidote' that can cure all their pain, right here, which is something any competent poisoner would carry on them if they weren't suicidally confident in their ability to not poison themselves or an ally. Anyone can endure pain, when they think there's no way to avoid it, or when it's a choice between pain and something they're not supposed to do, or when there's some kind of time limit like 'Until the bomb goes off' or 'Until the assassination happens' or 'Until reinforcements arrive'. But given the choice between agonizing pain and a perfect antidote... what sane person would choose pain?"

"Right. Sure. If that's the poison, where's the 'Antidote' they'll do 'Anything' to get?" Hamada asked skeptically.

"Behold!" Ryukatsu declared as he got out his peach bottle of fake antidote. "This is the 'antidote'... A similar bottle with the label removed, now filled with peach-and-bacon-flavoured yoghurt. My favourite kind of yoghurt. I could have filled it with burn salve, which looks similar and would probably be more believable, and would probably have a more believable medical-chemical-ish smell... but it doesn't really pour properly, or stick to weapons right. Idiot civilians would happily believe a miraculous peach goo saved them from death by black goo... And I'm pretty sure most Ninjas know burn salve when they see it or smell it."

"That's completely ridiculous. You won't fool anyone with that." Hamada said, folding his arms.

Ryukatsu smirked. "Have you no faith in me?" He asked.

Hamada unfolded his arms. "Come on, man, you know I believe in you. It's just... This seems kinda far-fetched, you know? Even for you."

"Seriously?" Ryukatsu asked sharply.

"Look, I'm sorry, but I really don't think-"

"Then let's bet on it." Ryukatsu decided. "I know my fake-poison trick can fool anyone, even someone older than me. And upon that certainty, I'm willing to wager..." He threw his arms out in a grand, dramatic sweeping gesture. "Fifty thousand ryo!"

"F-fifty thousand?" Hamada stammered. "I-I mean... Sure, why not. That's just pocket change to me!" He boasted, trying to cover up his shock.

"Excellent." Ryukatsu said, eyes gleaming with glee.

And then Shinkiro accidentally landed too hard on one branch and broke it off, swearing like a stabbed sailor as she fell to the ground and her friends rushed over to her.

Ryukatsu's mind returned to the present day, and he noticed that Kawasaki appeared to be on the verge of passing out. He wasn't sure if it was from pain, blood loss or humiliation, but he couldn't let his opponent pass out, and wake up later believing it was all some kind of dream or hallucination, or a Genjutsu. Also, he was pretty sure passing out when your body was that messed up would be bad for ome's health.

With a grand chakra-enhanced axe kick he called "Dragon Claw Kick!" despite being an ordinary chakra-enhanced kick, he shattered the earthen spike that had gradually began bearing Kawasaki's weight, the pain jarring him back to reality as he fell to the ground.

Ryukatsu gazed down at the scorched, bleeding body of his opponent. "I'm not done yet." He stated. "That was just one attack, one strategem, one option, something I came up with in less than a fraction of a second, and I'd been saving it all this time. I am but a mere Genin. I'm not from a clan, I have no Kekkei Genkai, and physical combat isn't even my specialty, yet I have beaten a former member of ANBU BlackOps. I have beaten you with the deadliest weapon in my arsenal... my mind. Yes, Kawasaki, I am a genius. And this is the fate that awaits all those who question me. Hopefully, this display of power will teach you this: When I give a plan or an order, you follow it. To the letter. Understood?"

Kawasaki growled and despite the burns and other damages marring his form, and the immense pain he was in, he got up using only his legs. Ryukatsu smiled and immediately burst into a small cloud of smoke, a tiny pebble appearing in mid-air, right where the center of his chest once was. The pebble fell to the ground lifelessly, because it was just a pebble, and Kawasaki looked around in rage, searching for that annoying, infuriating, explosion-loving brat so he could break every bone in his body. 'As an unavoidable result of his idiotic attempt to jump off a tall tree and punch him on the way down', of course. He didn't want any legal ramifications, so his defense had to be somewhat believable, but he didn't care if they wouldn't let him near Genin again. He didn't even care if he couldn't actually punch him with his arms in this state, he'd knee and stamp the prick to death if he had to. He bit down and shattered a fake tooth set in his jaw, giving himself the kind of boost only a Soldier Pill could give. As his chakra sped up, his pain was replaced with hate, his heart and liver screamed, and every part of his mind screamed 'KILL', save a small corner that yelled 'I don't care what my stool's gonna be like tomorrow, I'LL KILL HIM!'. He just wanted to find Ryukatsu, and break him. He just wanted to-

There! There he was, right in front of him! Ryukatsu Yamakuri, the source of all his pain, waiting for something. He charged forwards at the kid like a barbarian, no, a rhino. His mind awash with bestial rage, all strategy forgotten, he wanted to tackle that kid to the ground, and headbutt his oh-so-special 'Dangerous mind' until it-

"Exactly as planned." Ryukatsu said, his body flickering away and disappearing.

"Where the hell did you GO?!" The former ANBU snapped. He then spun around, swinging his limp arms back, expecting his opponent to be right behind him with a kunai ready to be driven into his spine. He wasn't there, and he was too enraged to notice how much that arm-swing hurt.

"Show yourself, dammit!" Kawasaki shouted to the sky.

Ryukatsu suddenly rose out of the ground in front of him, in a ready and slightly crouched stance, a kunai with twelve explosive tags and four immolation tags attached in his left hand. He lunged forwards and slammed his left elbow into the ANBU's stomach, knocking him back. Then he straightened his arm, stabbing him with the Kunai between his ribs, inserting the blade about one-point-five inches in, where it got stuck between his ribs and couldn't go in any further. Ryukatsu then turned his body and threw all of his strength and weight into a chakra-enhanced straight palm-thrust at the kunai's handle, sinking it in deeper, shattering those two ribs and forcing the kunai in, right up to the hilt.

Ryukatsu suddenly flickered and disappeared, reappearing fifteen feet away, the biggest smirk possible upon his face, even as sweat poured from his face and his chest heaved from having put so much chakra into that thrust. Azure chakra flaring up around his hands, eyes gleaming, he excitedly slammed his hands to the ground and gleefully whispered, "Earth Style: Hellfire Tornado Jutsu!"

Kurogane Kawasaki sunk into the earth up to the neck as three layers of rock rose around him, each layer rising higher, and the suddenly-created walls of broken, rocky earth converged on him. He thought the pressure that intensified every moment crushing most of his bones and organs was the bad part, but no, it got worse. His body was raised up as more earth converged on it, an earthen coffin rising from the ground in the shape of a giant uvula, one that grew larger as more rocks and clumps of mud crushed themselves onto it. And within the layers of rock, chakra from Ryukatsu's body set off the hundreds of explosive tags.

From this rocky shape's tip came an explosion that would normally crater the ground, kill everyone nearby, and start a forest fire that would eventually be stopped, but not before destroying a very large portion of the village and forest. Instead, chakra flaring up around him, Ryukatsu launched two more beams of raw chakra from his hands into the blast. Using his fine chakra control skills, he guided the shockwave and flames up and around into the tallest spiraling tornado he could manage, away from the trees and away from the former ANBU's body. He wanted there to be a body left over, a body that could be saved. He wanted witnesses to his power.

The former ANBU Ninja was engulfed in an enormous torrent of red and orange flames that could be seen for miles around, a huge monument to Ryukatsu's power that rivaled the height of the Hokage Tower, a macabre beacon of flames and death.

Staring directly into the inferno with a confident smile on his face, while his friends recoiled and braced themselves against the intense heat the tornado was giving off, Ryukatsu chuckled and loudly announced over the deafening crackle of flames, "Most people would see these fires and think they're the flames of hell... I'm just thinking, 'Somebody get me some marshmallows'!"

A senbon that may have actually been multiple senbon pierced Kawasaki's thigh, tearing right through some important nerve ending that removed that leg's function while bringing him back to reality, and the Jonin realized that he'd been trapped within a Genjutsu without even knowing it. Again. He wondered why the pain he was in didn't prevent that Genjutsu from working, and then remembered his rush to find Ryukatsu, and how his mind didn't recoil from that pain like a civilian pulling their hand away from heat, it ignored it and powered through it. And just to add insult to injury, four chakra-infused earthen spikes had been aimed at his body at different angles through Earth Jutsu, and his feet had been encased in a block of what looked like clay. All Ryukatsu had to do was perform the single final seal that'd send these earthen weapons flying into him, or tell Shinkiro to throw some kunai, or tell Hamada to swing or even throw his axe.

"Just so you know, I put the Genjutsu on you when I elbowed you, and that senbon could have easily been a kunai, or aimed at your throat, or a kunai aimed at your throat." Ryukatsu said cheerily, and Kawasaki turned his head to see three of them moving in utterly perfect synch, each tossing a kunai into the air and catching it. They didn't even have an echo to their voices, they must have been regular Bunshin. No Genin's elemental clones were that precise or in tune with the original. And then Kawasaki noticed Hamada standing behind the center Ryukatsu, hands on his shoulders, giving his chakra to his lightly-sweating friend. "Hey, do you think you'd wake up in time to feel the knife pierce the rest of your skin, or would you die while still in that illusion, believing I had the raw power, control, and focus needed to sculpt flames after everything I'd done to you? Even if most of my attacks were actually pulled off by clones. Also, I could have bound your body with chakra wire, and then had Hamada remove both your legs at the knees at the same time, misusing medical jutsu to grow some ugly scar tissue to stop you from bleeding out or getting too messed up, if you were an enemy Ninja I needed to capture alive."

"You're sick." Kawasaki growled as he finally began to pass out.

"No. I'm perfectly healthy." Ryukatsu stated, his wide eyes staring into Kawasaki's furious ones. "And do you know what's really funny? I didn't need to do any of this. I could have walked up to you, and used another one of my amazing jutsus. And you'd be nothing more than a corpse. I planned every move you'd make, every step you'd take, every breath you'd inhale and every time I kicked your ass, had a chance to stab you, and chose to drag this out longer. I'm just. That. Good."

"Damn... Looks like Tori needs to take over." Kawasaki said sadly, starting to pass out.

A figure clad in black leapt from the trees nearby, and as Ryukatsu clicked his tongue and Hamada leapt far backwards and readied his axe, the rosewood-haired boy wasn't sure if he was glad he hadn't used a Chakra Pulse and given away his ability to use that, or if he'd rather he used a Chakra Pulse to detect that Ninja's location. She didn't flip or twirl, she just came straight for Ryukatsu, soaring down with an extended knee, flying down at him. Meanwhile, another figure used Sunshin to appear near the beaten Kawasaki, and grab Kawasaki's body.

"Transform." Ryukatsu spat when his opponent was within thirty-five feet, making the necessary seal as his opponent rapidly grew closer, glad that click practically removed his opponent's reflexes and bodily control, as her sudden mid-air stumbling and limpness proved. Shame that Genjutsu used up so much chakra, and was so easy for anyone remotely competent to dispel after realizing it.

An intentionally-large cloud of smoke billowed from his form and dissipated quickly, revealing the rosewood-haired boy now clad in what could have passed for cobalt-plated purple-lined samurai armour, if not for the incredibly long and thin metal spikes that emerged from each section, each around thirty-seven feet long. He looked like some strange Sea Urchin-Samurai fusion. Some spikes pierced the ground in front of him, some stabbed into the air around him, and many kept his new opponent's twitching body impaled and suspended in the air-

Ryukatsu released the transformation, the body falling to the ground with a wet thud.

And there, the foe would lie, until it bled out and died. It wouldn't take long. It probably sustained some pretty bad organ damage. He probably couldn't save it.

Then again, this was either an ANBU, or someone dressed as one. And considering the ANBU technically didn't 100% exist, capturing one was either impressive or ridiculous depending on what department you worked in. And he was almost undoubtedly being watched, to try and see what kind of person he was, and if he could really be cleared for duty in a career where everyone was so worried about mental instability, saying anything wrong to the civilian psychologist you weren't allowed to disclose mission details to always had a chance to get you locked up or executed in secret.

"Alright, hold still." Ryukatsu said unnecessarily as he raised his hand, charging healing chakra to his right hand. He struggled to ignite the chakra around that hand for a few moments, before the sickly green glow properly flared up and could be maintained. He rushed to the bleeding girl and began to heal her with the one hand he could actually get the Healing Hand Jutsu to work on. Being able to - and having to - slip his hands under her clothes would have probably been a lot more enjoyable if she wasn't bleeding profusely from her many-

If he wasn't bleeding profusely from his many new holes. To his surprise, when he reached 'her' chest, he realized that what he initially thought was female was actually male. He decided to never tell this to anyone, ever, and continue to close up wounds. Yes, if a fourth Ninja was in hiding, he'd be facing them with little chakra left, but he wouldn't be doing it alone. Also, he was pretty sure this was some kind of test.

Ryukatsu glanced over to his teammates, and saw them get ready to fight when the figure that had grabbed Kawasaki showed up once again, the guy in the Owl mask. "Hey, kids!" He yelled jovially, waving at them casually.

"Yeah?" Shinkiro asked.

"One, you kids are messed up." He said, pointing a finger at each Genin in turn. "Two, I like it." He said as he clenched his fist, the grin on his face audible on his face and visible in their minds. "Three, you pass this guy's test!" He declared, throwing his fist in the air somewhat awkwardly.

"Really?" Hamada asked hopefully.

"Wait, how do we know this isn't part of the test?" Shinkiro asked suspiciously.

"Well for one thing, you three have gone so far off-script, I'd call the test off. If it was still on. Which it isn't." The man in the Owl mask said, shrugging. And then he chuckled. "It's funny, he had all of this planned out. You three were supposed to fight Kawasaki in a losing battle, he'd do some thing that'd make one of you choose between failing the mission and letting a teammate get captured or killed, probably pinning you and putting a knife to your neck, and no matter what option you chose, he'd fail you and send you back to the Academy. Then he'd rant at some idiot middle-management who has getting yelled at as their job, since he isn't important enough to see the Hokage and it's against the law to harm any of the pigs on the civilian council. Yeah, you guys weren't gonna get anywhere with him. UNLESS you managed to restore his faith in the modern education system, or more likely, be really good at this despite how much the Academy sucks. He really, really didn't want to get stuck babysitting some Civilian-mandated charity-case already-dead paper-pushing Genin-For-Life 'Keep them as far away as you can from the field, the battlefield, and any field in general, really, since these idiots would find some way to get themselves killed and anger the Civilian Council in the process' kids through D-ranks, but after the skills and teamwork you've shown, I'm calling Civvie BS if you three don't end up doing at least one C-Rank in your first two weeks."

"Woohoo!" Ryukatsu cheered as he threw his hands in the air and pointed his index fingers to the sky, leaning backwards as he brought his foot forwards and stamped the ground, expending four times as much chakra as is usually necessary to create the four Ryukatsu Earth Clones that slowly and silently emerged behind trees without handseals, just in case this was also part of the test and he was going to be attacked when his guard was down, to test his ability to improvise, rather than prepare. 'Well, the joke's going to be on everyone that's NOT me, because I'm NEVER not prepared!' Ryukatsu thought triumphantly. He also noted the masked man's choice of words. Two weeks? The legal requirement for anything other than D-Ranks was one week of active Ninja duty and at least one D-Rank.

And then he realized there was a reason why this man in the Owl mask was speaking so cheerfully. If they told anyone the most cheerful professional assassin, murderer, intel-gatherer and 'Problem-solver' of all time talked to them and carried their potential Sensei's almost-corpse to the hospital, and then ran back at full pelt to talk to the three kids that put him in that hospital, nobody would believe them.

"Alright, it's gonna take a while for the medics to fix THIS disaster," The man in the Owl mask said happily as he pointed a thumb back at the trees behind him. "You can't see it, but I've got a Fire Clone carrying that idiot to the hospital."

"You didn't take him there, then come back?" Ryukatsu asked, surprised.

"Why'd I waste time doing that when I could be talking to you three maniacs?!" The man in the Owl mask asked happily.

"Why was that guy REALLY kicked out of ANBU?" Ryukatsu asked.

"Besides the fact that he SUCKS? He's more of a field Ninja than an ANBU. You need subtlety for that kind of post. Stealth. Precision. Don't get me wrong, he has those. He's not some dumb cartoon character that'd walk face-first through a concrete wall and break it. But you need a certain mindset, and he just doesn't have it. Whenever things start going sideways, he chooses powering through it and doing whatever he thinks is right or necessary over trying to change things up or stick to the mission. Which is weird, since most people I've met with a Water Elemental Affinity are really great, they're all about going with the flow and the long game, eroding a rock away instead of trying to break it. Like with you three, he chose putting you guys through another year of Useless Academy while trying to tell his superiors it was the Academy that really failed you, over letting you out into the field and potentially letting you die. Which is STUPID, since you wouldn't have passed the Genin Test with high scores and a complete lack of usual Civvie BS if you weren't ready. Seriously, I'm NOT about to tell you about a secret mission that NEVER happened, so I'll give you three a perfectly hypothetical situation I might just write a book about, if you think you can keep a secret, and you think you can handle it."

"Perfectly hypothetical, got it!" Ryukatsu said cheerfully.

"Totally never happened." Shinkiro said, nodding.

"I love lying because fooling people makes me feel cool and adult!" Hamada said with a badly-faked smile, offering a single hand's thumbs-up gesture.

His teammates turned their heads to face him. "The fuck?" Shinkiro asked.

"I read it in a book." Hamada said shyly.

"Whatever, hypothetical story time. On some day, in The Land of Whatever, someone named The Gallant - And Stupid - Kamebakka was sent to check up on a 'Blimp' king somewhere in some city, living in some secret speakeasy hidden in some terrible tea house. He's supposed to gather intel, find some record of the stuff this guy runs, like some accounting books, and read it. Then, he gets out of there. Then he comes back, and if he can't remember everything, our magic guy remembers it for him. The guy with him for support helps out where needed, maybe provides the occasional distraction. But here's what hypotherically happened that day. He found the 'Blimp''s books, read them, and he found out this 'Blimp' was doing something he REALLY didn't like to some people he didn't know. And this is stupid, but he cared about those idiots anyway, like some Civilian trying to prove something to themselves. And he was also trafficking some bad stuff into the country, selling 'Homemade bathtub liquor' that was practically poison, and some other crap, but that wasn't what Kamesake hated, not even close. The Gallant And Stupid Kamebakka decides that instead of reporting this intel back to his boss like he's supposed to, he takes out a kunai, silent-kills the 'Blimp''s bodyguards quickly enough for each one to hit the ground at the same time, and he stabs the leader's arm, pulls out the kunai to let him bleed, and then uses a water jutsu to keep a water bubble around the guy's head. He freaks out, and it's pretty funny. Then just as his struggling gets slower, he doesn't gut the guy like a fish in front of the entire bar, or gut the guy like a fish and use the intestines as garrote wire to choke him while he bleeds, he one-ups everyone who'd ever do either of those things." The man in the Owl mask said, and increasing disgust became clear in his voice. "Kamebakka does whatever it's called where you get yourself and the victim up on a stage, the crowd watching, and you stab him to make him scream and drown faster, then you open up someone's chest enough for everyone to see their lungs and stuff, then he stabs those lungs as they fill with his jutsu's water, and it sprays out in front of him like some messed-up water feature while he bleeds and sprays and convulses and fucking dies! Is there a word for that? THERE SHOULD BE!"

An awed grin formed on Ryukatsu's face. "That's fucking sick!" He said with clear approval, unable to make himself sound disgusted like a Normal Person would be. Maybe this guy wouldn't be so bad after all.

"Anyway, scared workers and dancers are allowed to run, every killer working for this guy that isn't a sad orphan with no other option or whatever gets killed, everyone who is gets their fucking limbs broken and gets left to stew in their own piss and shit, everyone that tries to avenge their boss gets killed, and over the rest of his career, every time Kamebakka saw someone he now knew did something terrible related to this place, he kills that person, and if he has to put the mission's success in jeopardy to do this, he'll change the situation so he won't. He didn't have any crazy kills left in him at that point, it was just kill, kill, kill, with this stupid miserable look on his face, like the guy was cleaning toilets: He hated it, and it was disgusting, but if he walked away, it'd just get worse, and he couldn't let something that awful exist in this world. So he cleaned. He broke Itachi's record for Most Kills In One Afternoon, got enough in bounties to retire, even though he won't, and he only started walking home when everyone in town we could possibly threaten or manipulate with the intel we got that day was dead. Oh, yeah, and his better-looking friend Shinkami Kamikami had to roll with it, even though I'm the one with the Earth Affinity, since I couldn't stop him without starting a huge fight that'd end with one of us beaten down or killed, and even though I'm better at stealth, he's a better fighter. So I watch him kill, waiting for him to come to his senses, and he doesn't, not until we start going home and he starts talking to me and himself at the same time, like some underprepared Genin that just popped his cherry."

"Ew." Hamada said in disgust, recoiling a little.

"That means he got his first kill!" Shinkiro snapped, glaring at him. "Don't make it gay."

"Oh." Hamada said, embarrassed. "Wait, why-"

"Y'know, since cherries are red, and they have red juice inside them, and so do human bodies." Ryukatsu clarified.

"Oh. ...Ew." Hamada said.

"What else would it mean?" Ryukatsu, the only one of the three raised in a Ninja household, wondered. Very different katana-related euphemisms were used in his home.

Shinkiro facepalmed as Hamada chuckled. "I'll tell you later, Ryu." The girl sighed.

"So Kamebakka talks and talks and won't shut up, talking in circles, and it's really annoying. I say what the books say I'm supposed to say, and it doesn't seem to help. When we both get back home, they throw the book at him. The bosses had big plans for that intel, they were going to force that guy to go to war with some other city's Blimps, or kill some important people this Blimp liked and make it look like the other city's guys did it, and we'd clean up the trash once the war took out everyone's best Missing-Nin, Ronin, and pretty much anyone else that wouldn't be an easy kill some kids COULD do, if we weren't all obsessed with morals these days. Now, they've got nothing, save one purified town with everyone from other towns moving in to fill the power vacuum and un-purify it. And, of course, a huge dent in the Fire Lord's coffers he didn't think he'd have to pay out in one day. He wasn't too happy about that, which means our Hokage wasn't, either. Sure, in the short-term, his plan did more obvious good. But in the long term, our plan would have worked out better, since a lot of other long-term things we were working toward had to be changed and rewritten to account for this."

"Wow." Ryukatsu said quietly, surprised. "That's stupid of him, but at the same time... killing all that trash is pretty cool. And it's not like there won't be a smaller-scale war going on in that town to weaken their pseudo-militaries. And probably kill innocents in the crossfire, but there'd be more innocent deaths over a wider area with their original idea, and like this, the deaths will be concentrated to one area people know to get away from if they can. And ANBU or Jonin can always just go kill everything bad over there again and again until that part of the world runs out of bad guys. Still, I kinda feel bad about hurting him so much now." Ryukatsu admitted. "Even though he challenged us, underestimated us, punched me in the fucking face, threatened to set back our careers and lives by a whole year, insulted me and tried to turn my friends against me, refused to teach us unless we beat him in a fight, singled me out for my mental stuff, and ultimately brought everything bad that happened to him today on himself."

And just like that, Ryukatsu was over it. He wondered why he'd felt bad earlier. Probably the body's natural response to doing something bad to the potential ally of someone powerful while in his presence, he decided.

"Anyway, this idiot's gonna take a while to heal up. You'll have a week of paid leave as Genin, so use this time to train or something. You might want to exercise... some restraint!" The man in the Owl mask said, laughing.

Hamada laughed, for a few seconds. This person's personality and good cheer was, when he wanted it to be, just... unnaturally infectious. And then-

"Wait, we passed the test?" Hamada asked hopefully, smiling.

"Hey, the guy wanted you three to beat him in a fight. You did it! So yeah, you pass." The man in the Owl mask decided. "So yeah, go train. HEY, wanna see how mad the doc stuck healing this sad sack of failure gets?"

"Do I?!" Ryukatsu asked cheerfully, the man's sudden cheerfulness infectious- did that man just put him in a Genjutsu? He performed a Kai, just in case.

And so, the three Ninjas walked towards-

"Hey, what about that other Ninja I almost killed?" Ryukatsu asked.

"Someone got him out of here while you weren't looking." The man in the Owl mask said cheerfully. "By the way, thanks for healing him, he needed it."

"Anytime." Ryukatsu said.

And so, the three Ninjas walked towards the Hidden Leaf Village of Konoha's hospital, where they would see the doctor that was stuck healing Kawasaki.


	3. The First Final Battle! Earth VS Water!

"Hey, Shinkiro?" Hamada asked as the three left the Academy and turned down a street seemingly at random.

"Shh." She ordered, and he complied. She only spoke again once they had turned down another side street, certain she was no longer within regular hearing range of the Academy or its teachers. "Alright, do you know where our Sensei is?"

"We thought you knew!" Hamada protested.

"Well, I don't." Shinkiro said plainly. "Ryu?"

"Iruka had a clipboard, but I didn't get a good look at who sent it." Ryukatsu admitted, and had an idea, remembering Hamada's chakra reserves. "Hamada, could you send a Fire Clone back there?"

"I think it'd be better Shinkiro got it. You know my Clone AI sucks out of combat." Hamada admitted unhappily. "We want to look cool, right? So the last thing we need is some clone with my face yelling its instructions at some random Chunin."

"Fine." Shinkiro sighed, somewhat irritated, as she sprinted back to the academy at speeds the others couldn't hope to reach to ask Iruka where their teacher was, preferably while he was alone.

"So..." Hamada trailed off awkwardly.

"Hm?" Ryukatsu wondered.

"I knew she'd kick Sakura's ass." Hamada said happily.

"So did I. There wasn't even a shred of a contest." Ryukatsu boasted, because boasting definitely makes a character endearing. "Maybe they should just make me a Jonin, so we can skip the years of sabotage and assassination missions!"

"I'm back." Shinkiro said, showing up right behind them, still clad in the white energy of a Sunshin no Jutsu. Hamada was a little surprised, but he didn't move, and Ryukatsu tensed up, seeming unsurprised while screaming like a little girl inside his own head.

"Sweet." Ryukatsu said as he turned around, noting she seemed disappointed. She really missed the days when that would openly startle them both, didn't she?

"We're in Training Ground Nine, we're meeting someone called Kawasaki." Shinkiro explained.

"Is he ANBU?" Ryukatsu asked.

"Huh?" Hamada wondered.

"No idea, and they wouldn't tell me either way." Shinkiro admitted, irritated. "Sorry."

"It's fine." Ryukatsu shrugged. "His name fits the theme and he IS a Jonin, so it's likely."

"What theme?" Hamada questioned.

"They like naming ANBU agents after old battleships from the olden days. When on missions, they just go with generic extra-codenames based on the Zodiac animals." Ryukatsu admitted as the three made their way to their training ground.

"Oh." Hamada said.

Training Ground Nine was a wide circular arena of hardened dirt surrounded by grass and trees. Good for straightforward fights, but not so good for those trained in stealth or forest combat. In its center stood their new Jonin Sensei, a stocky and solidly-built man with cold grey eyes, short brown hair in sharp spikes, and a brown five-o-clock-shadow for a beard, the kind that suggested he stopped shaving for a few days sometimes, and only shaved when he felt like it. He was dressed in the usual ANBU uniform, black cloth with metal plates, and he looked like he'd rather be anywhere else but here.

"Yeah, he's ANBU." Ryukatsu said upon seeing him.

He looked at each Genin in turn, completely unimpressed by what he was seeing. When he saw Shinkiro's ANBU-inspired Ninja outfit, his mood soured even more. This was noted by Shinkiro and Ryukatsu.

"Alright, kids, listen up good, 'cause I'm only gonna say this once." Their potential Sensei growled.

"Here we go. This routine." Ryukatsu said aloud.

He raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?" He asked.

"You know, this routine." Ryukatsu shrugged, and breathed in. He performed the Transformation Jutsu, and became a middle-aged grizzled war-veteran version of himself, complete with heavy wrinkles, scars, a big bushy beard, and a single black eyepatch with 'Fuck off' written on it in dripping blood-red font. When he spoke, it was a child's imitation of a low and growly voice. "I'm a miserable old badass with a million million billion trillion fuckillion kills to my name, and I'm so edgy I eat nails and shit katanas! I miss the good old days when I killed stuff and everyone was jerks to each other 24/7, and I can't handle being told to be nice to kids, so I'll just whine about the younger generation sucking and 'Not being able to handle' my shit 24/7 while sneering at everyone greener than me that comes my way, hoping this will make me feel better about myself, even though many of these kids are quite likely to go through hell in this world, likely worse than I ever did because every generation gets stronger and LIFE IS SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!"

The ANBU slugged Ryukatsu in the face, cancelling his transformation and sending the boy to the ground, spitting blood. "Bitch!" Ryukatsu yelled, pissed off. "So you fucking have to fucking sneak attack a fucking child, you fucking fuck?! Oh, yeah, you only have 20 years and 200 pounds over me, why wouldn't you need to fight like a scared little pussy?"

"I fought like a ninja." The ANBU said with an insufferably smug grin.

"Pull your kunai out of your ass and I'll show you a fucking Ninja." Ryukatsu growled, his mediocre chakra unimpressively flaring around him.

"My name..." The ANBU said, ignoring Ryukatsu. "No, my codename is Kawasaki Kurogane, and that's what you will call me. Use my first or last name, I don't care. I look at you three kids, and do you know what I see? I see a nerd that thinks he's clever, and he's got two idiots who think they're willing to die for him, so he must be one, right? I see a rich idiot just waiting to be robbed, with the stupidest weapon I've ever seen. That's right, your gold axe doesn't look cool, it looks stupid, and even if that's real steel under the shitty gold paint, it doesn't change how stupid you look for having it on your back. Last and definitely least, I see a scared little girl playing dress-up with the big boys, and she doesn't just think she can hack it as a Ninja, which only one woman on the planet has ever been able to do - And that woman was blessed with a bloodline that did all the work for her - but she actually thinks she's good enough to wear something that's almost an ANBU outfit! Listen, girl, do you know WHY ordinary Ninja dress the way we do? Plain clothes and concealed weapons? We dress like this so it isn't immediately obvious that we're Ninja."

Shinkiro's angered response was to make a single hand seal. "Transform." She stated, and a small cloud of smoke hid her form from view for around a second, just long enough to reveal her new appearance. It was still Shinkiro, but in plain clothes, nothing more than a long-sleeved black T-shirt emblazoned with the crimson logo of 'Apocalyptic Deathsauce' on a background of broken femur bones, black sandals, and dark shorts. Her once-lithely muscular body was far less strong, the body of a lazy civilian girl that didn't do much of anything, with just a tiny bit of fat on the otherwise-slender arms. Someone very observant would have noticed her bra had been changed from a sports bra to a cheap non-sports bra, though the somewhat small size of her chest stayed constant. Finally, her face was a little less attractive, though Hamada wasn't sure why. Ryukatsu noted that she'd moved the tip of her nose up a little and slightly damaged her facial symmetry by making her right cheek ever so slightly less full than her left. On the other hand, her hair was healthier, almost like something out of a shampoo advertisement's illustration, the style changed from what she had before to generic long back-length strands, cared for well, to the point where her hair would likely be softer than a bird's feathers. They could even smell the scent of sickeningly-sweet supposedly-strawberry shampoo coming from her hair. "Civilian Shinkiro, ready to do boring civilian crap, like take shit from a butthurt old man in a dead-end job, Sir." Shinkiro said, and when she opened her mouth, it was revealed that while it wasn't that noticeable, her teeth were a few shades less white than they had been a few moments ago.

'That's a lot of small details.', Ryukatsu noticed. He wondered if she'd planned this ahead of time, or if she was just naturally good with transformations. He glanced at her hands, wondering if they'd be too rough or soft, and he saw that they were marginally softer than her hands were before she transformed, and that seemed about right, going for extreme 'I have unlimited funding for my hand cream' softness would make the transformation obvious. He looked at her feet, and they looked like the ordinary feet of a normal girl. He wasn't sure what to compare them to, since he didn't think he'd seen her actual feet before.

"You need chakra to make that transformation, and if you get hit, it's gone." Kawasaki criticized badly.

"If I get hit, I'm in combat, so I won't need to look like a civilian." Shinkiro responded. "Besides, it doesn't use up chakra that I wouldn't recover while casually walking around in that disguise."

"If you get hit in combat, it's all over." He stated.

"Then it won't matter what I look like if I do get hit, does it?" She pointed out, releasing the transformation with a slightly bigger puff of smoke that dissipated sooner, returning to her original form. "Look, we can all just put on Civilian-looking disguises if we need to. And if the band shirt is too much, I can replace it with something more boring, like a normal shirt, or some crappy, slightly-worn clothes. We're Ninja, remember? We can just make disguises out of nearby crap if a Transformation won't work for some reason. We don't need to wear useless crap that'll make fighting harder, like whatever protective plug you have up your ass."

"You've got it all figured out, don't you?" Kawasaki growled. "I used to be an Assassin in the ANBU BlackOps. But they took me out, because they wanted me to teach some kids. Because why serve the village like an ACTUAL NINJA ,when you can fill out paperwork that'll get burned anyway, and play with kids when you're not doing that?"

"Maybe they thought being around kids would be good for you?" Ryukatsu offered. "Besides, you're not playing with some random kids here, we're Academy Students, the potential future for our village."

"Wow. That was so sappy, I can almost taste my own vomit." Kawasaki said in disgust.

Ryukatsu was not expecting that response. "Wow, your standards are fucked. Ever heard of wisdom before."

"Yeah, you sound real, reeeal wise. And not pretentious at all."

He figured out what was going on here. "That might work on someone else. You're trying to make me doubt my ability to read people by intentionally going against what regular logic would suggest. What's your excuse for this?"

"Just trying to show you that people don't always do-" Kawasaki began to say.

What the older Ninja was about to say was so obvious, Ryukatsu felt a little piece of his respect for all of adultkind crack, fall off, and die. "-Do what I-" Ryukatsu interrupted in a mockery of the older Ninja's voice, the two speaking in perfect unison.

"Sandwiches." Kawasaki said pointedly as an irritated Ryukatsu that saw this coming said "Want.".

"Are you trying to say people will try and prove they don't do what you want when they know they're being predicted?" Ryukatsu asked. At least that would make sense.

"How am I supposed to teach someone like you?" Kawasaki asked, ignoring his question. "You can't fill a cup that's already full."

"If this cup was full, I'd be the Daimyo and Hokage in one, and rule this whole planet. I'm good with tactics, but you can always train me to be better at killing things or stealth." Ryukatsu pointed out. "Or would you rather I pretend to be an idiot? That wouldn't benefit anyone here, but if it'll make you feel better, I can do that. I've been working on my Naruto impression. 'It's super believable, believe it! Awesome Ninja skills like this are gonna make me Hokage some day, believe it!'."

"Okay, first of all, never do that again. Second, on the battlefield, do you think pure intelligence can save you? Do you think your opponent will just stop and let you set up whatever trap you want?"

"If you want, I can show you some effective stuff that won't take any major prep time." Ryukatsu offered.

"What's more important? Your teammates, or the mission?" Kawasaki asked pointedly.

"I know I'm supposed to say the mission, so I'll sound professional, but, if one of my teammates died, we wouldn't be able to carry out more missions after that one. The best course of action is to make sure everyone on this team survives, and if we fail some low-rank mission, it's not the end of the world, it'd just suck."

Kawasaki leaned forwards and pushed his forehead into a surprised Ryukatsu's face. "Look at you, so smug, so fake. You're hollow, you're empty, you're DEAD. You're already dead, what's the point in letting you out of this village? You should be locked up in a padded room in the Konoha hospital, hands strapped to your-."

A knee swiftly flew towards his enemy's most vital organ, because the rosewood-haired kid had figured out what was going on here and he wasn't having any of it.

Kawasaki disappeared, and reappeared behind his opponent, and was then slugged in the side of the face by Hamada. He did not fly away or fall down, but his head was moved and he stumbled to regain his balance. "I won't let you talk to him like that!" Ryukatsu's best friend yelled furiously.

"You're trying to make me snap, and it's pathetic." Ryukatsu stated, still irritated.. "If I snapped every time some idiot tried to provoke me, I'd have more kills to my name than you. I can see why you aren't in ANBU any more."

"Alright, how about this." Kawasaki offered. "Everyone, beat the crap out of Ryukatsu. I'll promote the three of you to Genin if you make him bleed."

"Kill yourself." Shinkiro spat with a glare of pure hatred, to Ryukatsu's clear surprise.

"What kind of pieces of crap would gang up on their own friend just because he pissed off someone else?!" Hamada shouted.

Ryukatsu knew they were his friends, but... Were they this loyal to him already? He felt a strange emotion welling up inside him, and he ignored it as he decided this would be a perfect opportunity to rub it all in his potential Sensei's face."Your obvious trap failed." He stated. "No wonder nobody wants you. Honestly, we're not sure if we want you, either."

"It wasn't a trap, it was a teamwork test, idiot." Kawasaki growled.

"Call him an idiot again!" Shinkiro yelled.

"SHUT UP!" Kawasaki shouted louder, charging chakra into his throat and mouth as he released a wave of killing intent, stunning the three. "An old colleague of mine had failed all the teams he'd been given with something similar to that, so I decided to rip him off. And change things up, because I don't have the time for any of his usual crap. By the way, you pass part two. Part one: Defeat me in a fight."

"What?!" Hamada asked, outraged. "How the hell are we supposed to do that?!"

"You can't." Kawasaki stated flatly, as if it was an absolute fact.

"Actually, we can do that." Ryukatsu pointed out. "We've trained to kill things far stronger than you."

"Ryu, don't you think it's a bit early in our careers for this?" Hamada asked, more than a little concerned for his friend's mental health.

"I have a plan, Hamada. Don't you trust me?" Ryukatsu asked.

"Time's up. Fight me, or I'll put you three in the hospital, and send you back to the academy when you can walk again." He settled down into a fairly low-crouching fighting stance, his weight on his back right leg, his left hand in front of his head with his fist clenched, his right pulled back in preparation for a strike. He seemed much more at ease like this than he was when he was just standing around like a normal person, and that detail did not go unnoticed by Ryukatsu. Shinkiro, on the other hand, was analyzing this stance's weak points and deciding where to stab. "You three are gonna fight me. And if you beat me... I'll be your Sensei. If not, I'll beat the three of you down until you grow up and stop playing Ninja. And then I'll send you back to the Academy, where you can try again with a different Sensei next term."

Shinkrio and Hamada looked at Ryukatsu, waiting for his response. After a few moments of thinking, he had made his decision.

"Okay, challenge accepted." Ryukatsu said.

Now that the decision had been made, Hamada felt a lot more sure of himself. "You should make a nice warm-up." He said confidently.

"Now then, where should I stab first?" Shinkiro wondered as she drew her kunai, one in each hand, and twirled them dangerously.

"Wow. How long did you spend coming up with those?" Kawasaki asked, amused at their attempts to act cool.

"A few seconds." Hamada said in the exact same confident tone.

"Alright, brats, get on with it." Kawasaki demanded.

"Oh no, oh no, you called us brats." Ryukatsu said sarcastically, secretly stalling to see if spending too long in that fighting stance without moving would slightly weaken or tire his foe. "We're so sad, that hurts us so much, right in the souls! And the hearts. Oh no. Oh no, ohhhh noooooooo, ooooooooooohhhhhhhh nnnnnnnnnoooooooooooooooooooooo-"

"Get on with it!" Kawasaki shouted.

"Gladly. Hamada, Shinkiro, charge!" Ryukatsu ordered. "Position Two!"

"Right!" His teammates chorused, and the two charged forwards at their Sensei. Hamada sped up as Shinkiro slowed down a little and got behind him, and the two ninjas fell into step together, ready to carry out the strategy known only as Position Two. After all, a far cooler name would risk giving the foe some hint as to what the technique did.

Kawasaki stood there, waiting, curious to see what they would do. He briefly thought of the ridiculous 'Combination attacks' children would think up, visually, acrobatically, and choreographically impressive yet utterly impractical spectacles that no self-respecting regularly-trained Ninja would have trouble dodging.

When they reached their target, Hamada swung his axe as if he was trying to cleave his opponent in half, just above his hips. Kawasaki casually drew a kunai and knocked the weapon back with a swift slightly-angled strike to the blade, sending it bouncing back to the ground. "Weak, and no control at all." Kawasaki sneered, drawing his leg back for a quick kick at the weapon-user's head, which turned out to be the wrong move.

Shinkiro jumped up over her teammate, having prepared for that, ready to perform a mid-air snap-kick at Kawasaki's face while the older Ninja's leg was already in motion.

Given the choice between dodging the attack or kicking Hamada in the face only to get kicked in the face by a pre-teen Genin girl, he chose to dodge. He casually sidestepped, letting her kick at nothing, sail past him, then land. He was somewhat pleased by the fact that she landed like a regular Ninja, and didn't pull some kind of stupid pose with her arms stuck out, or worse, punch the ground upon landing. She turned and charged at him again, and he didn't move until she was within striking distance.

With her kunai, she began stabbing at him with straight forwards thrusts, her arm motions remarkably similar to the Hyuuga's Jyuken fighting-style. He dodged each one by leaning back or to the side, stepping back in time with her constant forwards frontal attacks. "What do you think you are, a Hyuuga?" Kawasaki asked, slightly amused. "Do you think stealing their style will save you, Kunoichi?"

"Not at all." She said as she suddenly tossed her kunai knives forwards while defying the rhythm she'd built up. If he was relying purely on that rhythm, he'd have two big shaped wounds in his chest that'd cause him to bleed out pretty quickly if she hopped forward and yanked her knives out. Instead, he dodged them in a surprised state by using Shunshin no Jutsu, teleporting and reappearing about three feet to the right.

She reached into her right pocket, activated the sealing tag Ryukatsu had attached inside with a tiny amount of chakra, and ignoring the cloud of smoke, she pulled out a thick length of steel chain with a fifteen-pound iron ball at the end. She spread her feet and expertly began swinging the ball by its chain with her right hand, holding most of the chain with her left hand. She let go suddenly and launched the ball in front of her, aiming at his head.

He stepped to the side, letting the ball shoot past him and strike a tree with enough force to make a serious dent, splinters of fresh wood falling away from the impact. Kawasaki grabbed the chain and yanked it towards him suddenly, trying to pull the smaller girl with it, hoping to punch her in the face, to show her the weakness of chain weapons and why few Ninja alive today still used them.

She let it go, and allowed him to have the weapon.

"Surrendering your weapon so easily?" Kawasaki chuckled. "I guess you didn't want to be 'The Old Ball And Chain' like most girls, huh?"

Ryukatsu frowned. 'That joke was stupid.', He thought. 'That was a whole new level of stupid. Is he trying to make her lose her composure? I'm pretty sure he'll have to do better than that.'

"You crappy bastard! Burn forever in Ninja Hell!" She shouted, pretending to be outraged, performing the handseal required for activating explosive tags.

'That's it, make him think he's got you...' Ryukatsu thought proudly. 'Now, use my weapon better than I could!'

Kawasaki looked down, already suspecting what was about to happen, and he saw a few jet-black markings on several metal rings near the chain's end, just like the chakra-infused seals on Explosive Tags. An explosion like that wouldn't harm steel, but it would certainly harm flesh.

He dropped his kunai and got a green plastic cylindrical water canteen out of his pocket, effortlessly crushed the weaker sections of the already-weak material in his hand to release the water within, went through a series of eight handseals, and announced to the arena, "Water Prism Jutsu!".

The water rose up, a prism-shaped shield of moving water encased his whole body and began spinning around him at the same moment that the explosive seals on her chain weapon detonated. The blast washed over his watery shield with barely any effect, save creating a cloud of smoke.

A cloud of smoke that... was taking a remarkably long time to clear away. Was this part of some jutsu? Had the explosive seals been altered to produce this effect? Regardless, the longer he kept this jutsu up, the more chakra it would drain. And, he suspected, as soon as he dropped the jutsu, he'd take a kunai to the back or an axe to the body.

Focusing his chakra and mind, he dropped the jutsu as he channeled chakra and leapt into the air, backflipping once just enough for the weapons of the imaginary Hamada and Shinkiro to swing beneath him. He landed, and Hamada was suddenly right in front of him, clad in the white energy of a Sunshin no Jutsu, axe raised high above his head. He swung his blade down, and Kawasaki casually sidestepped the blow. Hamada stopped the blade just before it hit the ground and sunk in, the blade wobbling unsteadily, and he jumped back before any counterattack could be made. That wasn't something the older Ninja was expecting. Who the hell used Sunshin offensively? That jutsu could only be used so many times in a short period of time, utterly dependent on one's chakra control and reserves. Why blow one to make an attack when you might need one to save you from an attack you can't dodge?

Kawasaki wondered where Shinkiro was, and he got his answer when he heard the sound of someone leap from the ground, and he turned just in time to see Shinkiro aiming a snap-kick at his head. He blocked it, but she wanted that to happen, and she flung a chakra-infused wooden at his head while his arms were busy, the wooden tip striking his nose at a downward angle hard enough to break it. He stumbled back and clutched his face as blood began to pour from his nose, and an amused Shinkiro landed and looked down upon him. "Give up?" She asked.

"Do." Kawasaki muttered.

"You do?" She asked cheerily.

"DO I DOD'T!" Kawasaki yelled, pulling his hands away from his face.

"Are you sure? Because the next one won't be made of wood." She warned, drawing a metal kunai from a seal within her kunai holster.

"I SAID DO!" He roared, running toward her, only stopping to lean to the right and avoid a flying kunai coming at him from behind. From the corner of his eye, he saw the kunai turn into a Shinkiro water clone that threw a rain of six kunai with explosive tags attached from her hands, and the real Shinkiro and Hamada leapt away as a massive explosion blew Kawasaki apart, small pieces of him scattered over a wide area. Except it didn't, because all within the smoke cloud instead had its chakra drained, something Kawasaki found extremely painful. When the smoke cleared, he was standing there, panting heavily, feeling the hunger within him burn almost as much as his hatred and determination.

"Uh you do goig do do aww do wowk?" Kawasaki shouted. "Where'shu leaduh?"

Ryukatsu inhaled deeply. "FINISH HIM!" Ryukatsu intoned with a grand sweep of his arm, subtly casting a Genjutsu on his opponent using the sound. He also decided that to offset how the explosive-activation seal suggested explosive tags were nearby, he'd suggest that next time, Shinkiro have a Water Clone swing that weapon around while the real kunoichi hid and activated the explosive seals at the best possible moment. Or, she could tell the clone to handle the explosion when the real Shinkiro gave some kind of subtle signal. Also, he could probably use that seal as am intimidation tactic, to make the opponent think he had hidden explosive tags somewhere, when in truth, he had not, and a Clone was throwing a kunai right when the foe was distracted. Perhaps with more Earth Clones throwing their kunai to make sure that if he dodged one aimed at a vital area, he'd take two more in areas that'd slow him down, like the legs.

"Right!" His teammates said. Hamada adjusted his grip on the blade, holding it closer to the center so that he'd have better control over its swing, at the cost of less swinging power. Shinkiro, on the other hand, drew two more kunai, special ones she'd watched Hamada paid extra for, ones made of a chakra-conductive metal. She began to charge chakra into her blades and focus it at the tip, that blue energy appearing and covering each edge. The blue blade around the metal one grew and extended two inches from the tip, the angle of each edge sharpening accordingly.

"Wow, what leadership." Kawasaki said sarcastically, drawing a single kunai, having not noticed Ryukatsu's Genjutsu subtly slow his perception of time and his reflexes along with it, the effect gradually intensifying. "This team's definitely going places."

Hamada charged, swinging his axe down at his opponent's head, and Kawasaki assumed this new method of axe-holding must have been more effective because it was definitely faster than it was a moment ago. Their potential sensei blocked the huge axe with a single small kunai, because no matter how fast this kid was, he was stronger. Perhaps this was what the boy really trained for, and the untrained swings of a drunken woodcutter earlier on were merely to lower his guard... A stupid idea. A real foe would kill a weak enemy before they could prove themselves to be otherwise. The golden axe sunk into the kunai's metal and the weapons locked. Hamada fiercely pushed down, throwing all of his strength into the attack, trying to break the lock. Kawasaki didn't seem to be putting in any effort at all, but he was actually finding this a lot harder than he would have liked. His kunai was pushed back a half-inch, and then it began to shake. "Not bad, kid." Kawasaki grunted.

Shinkiro charged at him from behind with a loud war cry, kunai knives at the ready. He snapped-kicked his leg back and kicked her in the chest, sending her tumbling back until she hit a tree about eight feet away and turned into water, revealing herself to be a water clone.

"You BASTARD!" Hamada roared anyway, pushing down harder with all of his fury and hatred. Sure, it was a clone, but he didn't care about that.

The older ninja's kunai was pushed back another half-inch. The ANBU growled, and began openly trying to push back. His Kunai started to slowly push his opponent's axe back, albeit with a great deal of effort.

While the two Ninja were trapped in that clash, Shinkiro flung a Kunai aimed at Kawasaki's gut, at the kind of speeds birds would be jealous of. He dodged the flying blade by using Shunshin no Jutsu, appearing a few feet to the right in spiralling streams of white space-time energy. Hamada's axe swung through nothingness and struck the ground, cracking the ground a little and getting stuck.

Just as Kawasaki was about to turn and attack the immobile Hamada, Shinkiro charged forwards with her arms close to her sides, legs bent, kunai in hand, for another attempt at a leaping snap-kick aimed at Kawasaki's face. The older Ninja dodged by stepping to the side and leaning, but as Shinkiro's side soared past his still-moving head, she flicked one of her kunai with her wrist, a quick, subtle, blurred motion that sent a grey blur aimed between his eyes. Kawasaki was forced to evade the thrown knife by using Kawarimi no Jutsu, the Substitution Jutsu, a wooden log appearing in his place, the real him behind a tree, somewhere in the forest.

Shinkiro, Hamada, and Ryukatsu got back-to-back instinctively, each one covering the other's blind spots, knowing that their foe wouldn't have gotten far if he'd been trying to conserve chakra. They could end this attempt at stealth with one of Ryukatsu's Chakra Pulses, though it'd also reveal that he could do such a thing... then again...

"C-2." Ryukatsu ordered, performing handseals, his teammates doing the same.

Three voices cried out three different, yet similar, techniques at the same time.

"Water Clone Jutsu!"

"Fire Clone Jutsu!"

"Earth Clone Jutsu!"

Ryukatsu's chakra-infused right foot stamped upon the ground with the tone of a master issuing a command, causing earth to rise up from the ground in front of him as rocky clumps, before forming into twelve copies of the rosewood-haired boy. Seven sparks ignited in front of Hamada, flickering out into the forms of the stronger boy, axes in hand, eyes dead ahead. From puddles around the battlefield came semi-liquid replicas of Shinkiro, emerging like a fish breaching the surface to stand emotionlessly atop the puddles as their bodies solidified and gained colour.

Like clockwork, the Shinkiro Water Clones leapt into the trees at high speeds that would tire out the original Shinkiro quite quickly, causing them to appear as mere blurs that departed as every Hamada Fire Clone and a third of the Ryukatsu Earth Clones took up defensive positions around the three Clone creators. The other two thirds of Ryukatsu Earth Clones joined Ryukatsu, though at a more sedate pace.

And Kawasaki, just a few trees away from the team, knew it was only a matter of time before he was found. A kunai sailing into the tree trunk behind him confirmed this, as did the attached explosive tag detonating as he dived away, only to find it was a sonar tag. Those within five feet of the blade had things done to their eardrums a vulgar person would write colourful passages about, not that the two of Shinkiro's Water Clones that had found him cared. The other searching Water and Earth Clones only cared enough to know it was the signal that meant somebody had found their target. As for Kawasaki, charging chakra into his eardrums at the last possible second was all that stopped his ears from rupturing violently enough for blood to pour and deafness to ensue, and when a rain of perfectly-angled kunai suddenly soared down from the air like lawn darts, the cloud of metal death dense enough to momentarily blot out the sun, Kawasaki knew to get out of there as quickly as he could. A quick Kawarimi no Jutsu locked on to the log he'd used earlier caused the rain of metal to fall upon the two Water clones, and the rest of them to converge on nothing-

Or they would, had Ryukatsu not seen Kawasaki show up in the log's former location and given a quick high-pitched birdlike "Ka-KAA!" to signal that Earth Clones and Water Clones alike needed to return to their creators.

Earth, Water, and Fire Clones alike rushed Kawasaki's position, and he settled back into his fighting stance, his left hand drawing a concealed Kunai from his clothes, ready to take out some rage.

Three Shinkiros threw kunai at him, he deflected it as he sidestepped a snap-kicking Shinkiro and punched her in mid-air with his kunai-wielding hand, reducing the water and chakra construct to a splash of mere water. A Hamada charged at Kawasaki with his axe raised high, and when Kawasaki struck him in the gut with a quick kick, he burst apart and became a small plume of spreading fire that set that leg alight. Two Ryukatsus performed a series of handseals and slammed their hands to the ground while crouching, only to propel themselves forward as their features shifted and they turned back into earth that reshaped itself into the rock of two Earth Dragon Jutsus. The two crossed in front of Kawasaki, then turned to try and crash into his sides, only when he leapt back, they angled their heads towards him and smacked their tails together to turn themselves into a hail of compressed earth. He turned and shielded his face, only for a hail of what felt like Shuriken to make tiny cuts along his body and embed themselves about a half-centimeter into his skin.

He returned to his stance and brushed the shuriken away, ignoring the pain and finding that the shuriken were earthen, having been expelled from an earthen wall one of Ryukatsu's Earth Clone had sacrificed himself to erect while Kawasaki was distracted with the earthen dragons, and he saw a whole lot of kunai flying at him, each from a Shinkiro. Someone with more finesse, such as an Uchiha or a very agile show-off, might have deflected each kunai, maybe even deflected one and knocked it away so it would deflect the one behind it, and that would deflect the one behind it, and so on until there was just a kunai pileup in the form of a cloud of greyish-black in front of him, from which he or she could pluck falling kunai and return fire. Kawasaki simply dodged with a diving dodge-roll to the right, landing on one knee and sprinting towards the crowd of Ryukatsus, grabbing a snap-kicking Shinkiro by the leg and bodily flinging her at the Clones. They did not recognize her as a Kunai, or a Shuriken, or any other weapon, so they assumed she was some variety of Ninjutsu technique and dodged, while three Hamadas swung their axe at Kawasaki like an old-world athlete throwing what they incorrectly called a hammer. Kawasaki saw the gold glinting out of the corner of his eye and stopped his charge to block all three, each turning into a rather harmless burst of flame that only served to heat up his kunai a little. A kunai was thrown at Kawasaki by a Shinkiro in his blind spot, aiming for what she believed would be the most effective target, since her combat cycles currently decided she should distract him to make things easier on the others. A kunai that struck him between his cheeks, turning into painfully cold water that caused almost every muscle in his body to lock up for a moment, a moment that let a flying Shinkiro Water Clone go for a snap-kick and finally hit him, right in his right cheek. Meanwhile, a hail of kunai descended upon his position, forcing him to keep moving as that kicking clone fell to the ground and turned into water from its impact with the ground, providing a puddle a landing Shinkiro Water Clone used to create four more Water Clones. While these four got out two kunai each and began to charge chakra into them, the creator of those four used a water jutsu, melting into it to become the water it needed to sustain itself. The jutsu was like a small, rounded wall of water, from which a hail of water bullets shot forth, like bullets, aimed at Kawasaki, and as he leapt away, the rapid onslaught of rain continued to aim after him. He succeeded in dodging it for a few seconds, but as that Shinkiro began to tire and the small water wall began to destabilize, another hail from a different one of Shinkiro's Water Clones struck him in the back, each harsh blow like a boulder that hurt him despite his lightweight armour.

For one last attack, every clone converged on Kawasaki's position in a blast of water and flames, the older Ninja leaping up to avoid the attacks, a kunai in hand to deflect everything Shinkiro threw at him.

Finally, Ryukatsu had felt his opponent had suffered enough. Ryukatsu took out two kunai with attached explosive tags and casually tossed them into the air either side of him, and as he entered a fairly standard slightly-crouched agile fighting stance, he declared to his team, "My time to shine!"

Suddenly, Hamada and Shinkiro used the Kawarimi no Jutsu and disappeared. At that same moment, two kunai with attached explosive tags appeared in mid-air, right where the center of their bodies had once been. Hamada and Shinkiro reappeared at Ryukatsu's side, a little disoriented from sudden switch in positions . The explosive tags detonated, and Kawasaki avoided the explosions by using Shunshin no jutsu to teleport his current maximum of seventeen feet back away from those explosives, shielding his eyes with his left arm as his body was assaulted by the heat and noise.

"Perfect." Ryukatsu said, a draconic grin forming on his face. There was a limit to how many times Shunshin no Jutsu and Kawarimi no Jutsu could be used in a short period of time independent of one's chakra, and thanks to his teammates, Kawasaki had gotten pretty close to that limit, if he hadn't reached it already. "Good job, team. Let's use S-1." He said, and his teammates knew that if he said anything before he said S-1, they were supposed to use Standard Formation Two instead of One.

Standard Formation Two was fairly simple: Watch the fight from the best angles, recover stamina, and act as support. Only step in when the Main was in danger, using a combination attack that required your input, or had called your name. When the Main gave a "Hm" of a certain pitch, throw a kunai or shuriken, or otherwise distract the foe. Or take advantage of the distracted foe, if the "Hm" sounded more urgent, for this was your cue to try and land something debilitating or deadly on the opponent.

And here and now, Ryukatsu was the Main. His teammates spread out accordingly as his opponent stared him down. "Dust you ad me, sbart guy." Kawasaki stated.

"You think I should be locked away?" Ryukatsu asked curiously, stepping forwards and getting into his real stance, left leg forward and right leg back, his left side facing his foe, knees bent. He was sightly resting on the balls of his toes so he could sprint forward or leap to the sides quickly if he had to, leaning forwards slightly, ready to strike with his knees if he had to. His right arm was raised in front of him, angled up to be ready to deflect attacks or strike with his elbow if need be, his right arm bent and ready to strike with a chakra-enhanced jab, hook, or a stronger elbow strike. His mouth was set halfway between determined grit teeth and the grin of a dangerous predatory animal, and his eyes bore straight into his opponent, devoid of fear, filled with excitement over the prospect of ensuing violence and the chance to really show what he could do. His eyes weren't the steady eyes of a soldier or the furious eyes of a warrior, they were the analytical eyes of a scientist that wanted to see how long it'd take for this particular experiment to bear fruit, and then deteriorate as he watched. "Let's see if you could take me."


End file.
